Obviously Linux is the correct choice

Spoken like a true fundamentalist, completely disconnected from reality! The top of the Linux breed!

Linux is not “obviously” the “correct” choice, mate. It CAN be. In CERTAIN scenarios. It’s awesome if people do it, but you need to be real here.

Sooo, I’m in the same boat. Only, I sold my GPU expecting to get an upgrade and then didn’t for a long while - which is when I decided to make the switch to Linux, just to see how things go.

Now I added the GPU and - with issues - managed to get gaming going. It’s fine, I think. Played Hogwarts Legacy yesterday for a couple of hours. Got a 7800x3d and RX 9070 XT, with everything on Ultra (including Ray Tracing) and upscaling disabled, my GPU would be sitting between 80 and 100% utilisation, but FPS was very comfortable (don’t have a counter so don’t know exactly how many, but it was smooth).

HOWEVER, after a couple of hours my main monitor turned off and the other one turned… green. I think the graphics driver crashed? Not sure, honestly. Anyway, after a reboot everything was fine. Overall, I had a nice four hour-long session yesterday.

I guess what I’m saying is - give it a go! KDE is beautiful (do recommend Garuda Linux just for the design choices, but they also have A TONNE of “I’m a noob, help” features pre-configured), gaming is fine, you might enjoy it. And if you don’t, just switch back to Windows.

Well, to be fair, there was A LOT of weird stuff happening. Steam wouldn’t open at all (unless called from the terminal), or would open with just a black screen (GPU acceleration issue). At some point, I’m pretty sure, I had three instances of Steam installed. It was chaos.

I have been using Steam and Heroic as flatpaks for a long time, and never had any issues.

I have two NVMe drives - 1TB and 2TB. I keep the OS and “regular apps” on the first one, games go on the second one. Moving the libraries was DIFFICULT on Flatpak. Had to use external software (Flatsomething, can’t remember right now) to give permissions and even then, for some reason, sometimes installation would just fail with a “drive error”. Oh, and I had to search online to provide the appropriate Steam path for Heroic because, by default, it doesn’t see Flatpak Steam.

I’m pretty happy with the state of the OS and GUI as it is right now. Just moved a couple of things around, basically.

I do have a problem with Flathub, though - in theory, it’s great. But I’m going to be playing games on this PC and Flathub causes MASSIVE problems for Steam and Heroic Launcher, their libraries and Proton compatibility. Love the idea, don’t like the execution.

Garuda (or maybe it’s an Arch thing?) does a phenomenal thing with AppImage files - when I launched the first one it asked me if I want to add shortcuts to Application Laucher and tuck the AppImage away in a safe spot, so that it doesn’t sit in Downloads. LOVE that feature.

Since I REALLY wanted to just not be bothered with the issue of drivers (especially AMD drivers) I went for one of the “gaming” distros - Garuda Linux.

And I have to say, I’m very positively surprised. Judging by the images on their website, I was afraid it’ll be one of those, you know, “pro gamer, full RBG rainbow” bullshit designs, but no - it’s actually very pretty live, looks much better than on their website.

Runs on Arch (Zen?) and has a bunch of things that I like - for example an app called “Garuda Rani” which is basically: “you’re a noob, here, press these buttons to make things work”. It even includes installation shortcuts to some popular applications (Heroic Launcher, Steam, for gamers, but also Wine and Proton, AnyDesk, Discord, VLC, some emulators, a bunch of Linux games (they have SuperTux here!), etc.)

Overall, other than a slight issue with my favourite browser* and repositories**, everything so far seems to be smooth sailing.

* Created a profile, had it running, changed the hostname and it, apparently, screwed the browser over as it was looking for the profile on the old hostname. Weird stuff. Nuked the profile, recreated it, all is well.

** One of those “press these buttons to make things work” includes merging the mirrorlist. Since I knew nothing about it, I just merged one file to the other, didn’t think a second about it, and then when I tried installing Steam, I got an error about a “missing repository for extras”. Managed to fix it after finally reading what the # signs mean in the mirrorlist file (everything was commented out - every single server…).

I ended up switching to a different distro and now everything seems to be working fine. Tuxedo OS really didn’t like my new graphics card.

I ended up switching to a different distro and now everything seems to be working fine. Tuxedo OS really didn’t like my new graphics card.

I ended up switching to a different distro - Tuxedo OS didn’t really like me putting in an AMD graphics card.

Haven’t had the time yet, but it’s on my to-do list. Just not sure if they will support this as I’m running it on my own hardware, not their laptop.

6.11.0-109019-tuxedo.

Not the latest, right? I guess I’ll wait for an update.

Does the system also freeze on lock screen without the sleep? superkey(winkey)+L

No, lock screen works fine.

Cheers for the links, I’ll look into that!

That’s interesting! Might be KDE bug then.

Could you try going to System Settings → Screen Locking and de-select “Lock after waking from sleep”? I wonder if you’ll get the same result as I’m getting.

Before I updated the BIOS to the latest version, once I woke it up, I’d see the desktop exactly frozen as it was the moment I pressed the “Sleep” button.

Now, after the update, that freeze happens BEFORE the PC goes to sleep - the monitors stay on.

So, I did a BIOS update, as advised here, and got some interesting results!

The freeze still happens - but it now freezes BEFORE the PC shuts down.

As in: I click the Sleep button, all devices get disconnected (audio, network, BT, input - all of it goes), the OS freezes, but the screens stay on. I cannot switch to a different VT at this point as everything is disconnected.

Oh, yeah, that’s true! Didn’t know that’s a thing here, good to know!

No, the keyboard is unresponsive. I also tried Ctrl+Alt+F1…F7, and got absolutely nothing.

I did a BIOS update, as advised here, and the behaviour changed! Now the freeze happens BEFORE the PC goes to sleep. As in: it gets to the frozen state the moment I click the button and the screens remain on.

I did some more digging and in System Settings → Screen Locking found an option called “Lock after waking from sleep”. Since the OS was freezing on the lock screen, I disabled that to see what happens.

The OS freezes completely just before the shutdown to sleep - I can see ALL devices get booted out - network, BT, audio, mouse, keyboard - everything gets disconnected and then freeze happens.

I have updated the BIOS to the latest version and since then the freeze happens BEFORE the OS goes to sleep. As in: I click the Sleep button, everything freezes, that’s it, the screens never turn off.

So it doesn’t seem like it’s something that’s happening in BIOS during wake-up/reboot, right?

Don’t need to check, I built the PC myself - it’s currently running on the iGPU from the 7800x3d.

(K)Ubuntu is configured to apply updates at reboot to minimize any breakages

That’s the problem - it never did apply the updates. I even tested that by manually telling it to download them all and then rebooting once they were all ready to install. I had to re-download them all after logging back in.

I also noticed that one account was always getting app updates while OS updates were ONLY showing up for the primary account,

I get how this may be “by design”, but it’s an infuriating design. :D

Did the toolbar just disappear from all apps?

Correct. It was just not there. I was able to add the Global Toolbar widget and get a “Mac-like” experience, or add it as a hamburger button on the titlebar, but that’s it.

Automatic mounting of drives is done easiest through editing the /etc/fstab file in Linux. I am not aware any other methods that are more user-friendly

Which is also extremely bad design, if you ask me. For removable drives - sure, why not. But if it’s a bloody NVMe sitting on the motherboard? Also: there just should be a prompt going “do you want to auto-mount this” the moment the user mounts it through Dolphin for the first time.

Unless you have a specific reason for using Tuxedo OS, I would highly recommend Fedora with KDE Plasma desktop environment

As of right now, I’m having a great time with Tuxedo OS - other than the Sleep function not working, everything else is smooth sailing. I don’t want to use Fedora, because I’m more familiar (if still barely) with the Debian Linux family.

It also ships with the latest versions of the kernel, so you’ll have less driver issues.

Is there an easy way to check the kernel version I’m running vs the latest available?

Well, I updated the BIOS - no change so far. I guess I’m stuck without Sleep. :/