I have been using Arch Linux with i3wm for around 5 years for work, on my ThinkPad. I am fairly comfortable with pacman and setting up a distro. I have previously tried Mint, Manjaro, KDE Neon, Elementary, and MX Linux, all for the same use case (Work: where I need a browser, Slack, and a MongoDB GUI).

However, I have been using Windows on my desktop that I use for gaming and the Adobe suite (photoshop and illustrator mainly). With the increasing enshittification of Win11, I want to migrate full time to a Linux system on desktop as well. I prefer a more stable experience on this machine so I chose Pop OS (other suggestions are welcome. I like Plasma). I need some help getting started (I did some preliminary trials on a VM where I was able to run a small game off GOG, but the part I need help with needs some trickery wrt different disks).

PC specs:

  • Ryzen 3 3300X
  • 16 GB DDR4
  • 1 NVMe boot drive, 1 SATA SSD for games, 1 HDD
  • RX 570 8 GB

My copies of Photoshop and some of my games are pirated. I’m planning to run a Tiny10 VM for the Adobe stuff but the games will need to run on bare metal linux, off the NTFS formatted game drive. Edit : Most importantly, Content Manager and mods for Assetto Corsa need to work (not pirated), with my Thrustmaster T128

I would be grateful for a guide for this.

  • CommunistEnglish
    8·
    6 months ago

    I highly recommend fedora kiniote if stability is your goal always go immutable

      • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
        92·
        6 months ago

        It is, but you shouldn’t be using it, keep your OS clean and go all in on flatpak and distrobox.

          • nfsm@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            6 months ago

            Fedora atomic (I’m using bazzite for gaming only) have Flatpaks enabled by default and are recommended, so it integrates well with the OS.
            And seeing where the Linux community is going right now, Flatpak has been widely adopted by most distros which are not Debian based. There are ways to go regarding the packaging for the developers, but there are plenty of apps already on flathub. I’m using it on arch and bazzite and have no problems so far.
            I can’t comment on the apps the OP requires

          • CommunistEnglish
            36·
            6 months ago

            Every single way that flatpak doesn’t integrate well into the OS is easily fixed with minimal effort.

        • ulkesh@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          If only every software I need had a flatpak option for installation. That is the problem right now with going this route for me. I dumped Bazzite solely because of this reason (and because it kept wanting me to reboot after installing simple user-space software, and I now know there’s an non-intuitive way to avoid this). I’m not yet sold on the atomic distros.

          • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            Fair enough, it’s not well explained. If something isn’t available, install it in a distrobox and export it, same effect, but you keep your OS clean…