Well, back to my desktop computer after a 4 month hiatus. I ran Zorin OS Core on my Thinkpad while away, and it ran pretty much flawlessly. I did try a lot of distro’s on a VM, but just liked the Zorin the most.
When I came back to my desktop, I was surprised that all of the Manjaro XFCE updates installed and the system rebooted fine. The same problems still existed, so I decided now was a good time to switch distros.
I installed Zorin OS 16 Pro (they had a benefit Ukraine week, so I donated) and although the install went well, OpenCL was a no go with my AMD RX550 card. After a couple days of trying, with some very patient help from a gentleman on the Zorin Forum, I gave up on the card. Luckily, I found an Nvidia card on Craigslist locally that would fit, picked it up and swapped it out. After an easy GUI install of the NVidia 510 drivers and a reboot, OpenCL was up and running.
I think people assume that AMD GPUs are “better” on Linux, due them being fully supported for OpenGL hardware acceleration under the opensource drivers. Not the case for OpenCL acceleration though, as it needs proprietary driver installation.
Yeah, this was always a big problem with AMD on linux. If you want to use DaVinci Resolve on linux you end up with the same issues of having to install the proprietary driver, or constantly switching between the two(If you need the open source one for gaming etc, as it is faster).
I found it interesting that I had so much trouble on the Zorin Distro getting OpenCL enabled with the AMD Radeon. First time dealing with this card on an Ubuntu based distro. Along the way, I had tried Manjaro Gnome, one package install to get OpenCL running. Unfortunately, lots of other annoyances on Manjaro, didn’t want to go back on Manjaro. I would have thought that Ubuntu based distros would have better support for AMD OpenCL. Live and learn.
Did run into problems with the OpenSuse Build Service package of darktable 3.8.1. Camera was not recognized. Various fixes suggested didn’t work, including installing from the repository. Finally went with flatpack, seems to be working well so far. It reminds me of getting SCSI devices going in the old days. Joke was you had to make an animal sacrifice to be sure of getting one to work.
Manjaro is not worth the troubles anymore, specially after the whole money situation that happened a few months ago. Better go for Arch itself or EndeavourOS which is also a great choice.
Flatpak is great and definitely the future for linux GUI applications.
My “new” computer will be two years old in August, 2022. I run Arch Linux with an nVidia RTX2060 and the proprietary nvidia driver, and also openCL. I have had no real problems with it that I can think of, especially since I learned to properly deal with the driver updates. All there is to that is to make sure I run mkinitcpio if the nvidia driver is updated and the kernel is not updated at the same time.
I’m going bored with windows and thinking of giving Linux a whirl again. My laptop has an 11th gen i5, 16gb Ram and intel iris Xe max graphics.
To start with, I’m thinking of either dual booting win11 and Linux. Or maybe put in a second nvme and install Linux on that. I’d like my “data” partition to be accessible from both windows and Linux. Which file format is best for this?
I dabble with dt ( of course), and want to try out blender and resolve. On windows, I use Affinity photo, so I’ll need to learn to use gimp as well. I have played around with Ubuntu, mint, fedora and even opensuse for short periods. I can generally Google around for solutions to problems, and have to managed to solve some issues by copy pasting code into terminal. But it’s usually a lot of trial and error. I don’t have any coding knowledge and haven’t attempted building from source.
So, which Linux distro?
Yeah, that is what I would do. If you have another machine and disk space to spare, you could use something like syncthing to keep all of OS’s in sync.
I am using ntfs for data shared between windows and linux on dual boot (though I hardly every boot to windows these days). I was already happy with ntfs-3g and now there’s even an in-kernel filesystem. Works just fine.
Regarding distros what Claes said: There are differences, but more similarities. The more impactful decision is which desktop environment, because that will be what you see and interact with. Basically gnome and kde are the big, simple options, I’d recommend going with one of those to start with.
I’d suggest Linux Mint or Zorin as two distro’s that are friendly to new users. Mint has the cinnamon desktop which is similar to Windows, and easy to configure. Zorin Core uses a modified Gnome which is easily customized to a window like desktop using their built in appearance configurator, and it’s a very well designed system. Also easy to set up a dual boot. If you do go do boot, install Linux second on a separate drive if you can. Good forum support as well.
As suggested in earlier posts, booting a live environment off a USB3 stick is a great way to check things out before installing.
I’ve had good results with my Flatpak apps, and have been replacing distro packaged apps with Flatpak over time. I don’t mind giving up a little disk space to do so. I think that this is a big step forward for Linux, and hope more become available. I’m very happy with my Zorin OS install, and since I run older hardware, the older kernels are fine. There are a few hiccups here and there, but nothing really bad. And I find the upgrades easier to deal with.