What would you reccomend/use for an alienware laptop m17r5 with amdcpu (idr) and gpu 6850mxt. Idc about adjusting the keyboard lights, I changed it once and never touched it again. I play games like cities skyline, noita, etc. and some vr stuff rarely like vtolvr and warthunder. I use blender and houdinifx.
I’ve seen PopOs reccomended for Blender users but I think thats because it comes with a lot of stuff you need for Nvidia, which isn’t relevant to me with an all amd setup.
Cachyos seems to be the move for best performance with rendering and simulating, was wondering about other options I have since I dont need to worry about nvidia drivers.
I dont like the idea of using ubuntu because of snap packages, but its not a big deal.
While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.
Currently Interested in: CachyOs Debian (leaning towards here if I go the stable route) EndeavorOs Mint (seems popular, is it just simplified?)
PopOS is in a rough state. The stable ISO is using absurdly an absurdly outdated desktop, and the beta using COSMIC desktop. I personally love COSMIC, but it is far from stable, so I would not recommend it to most users.
CachyOS is a great distro. The performance gains from its changes won’t be huge, but the people acting like its nonexistent are silly. They also make many upcoming performance improving features like NTSYNC available early in their default kernel.
I definitely wouldn’t go Debian or Mint for gaming personally. I don’t like stable distros with such slow release schedules for gaming, mainly because of stuff like the prior mentioned NTSYNC. You don’t get those new features for a long time.
I saw people recommending Bazzite, which is a distros I highly recommend. The only issue I have with Bazzite is that installing kernel modules they don’t ship is pretty much unsupported and requires a lot of jumping through hoops. Most people won’t need this, but it matters from some use cases like if you need steering wheel drivers.
Gnome 42.9 feels attacked.
It should lol. I’m not the biggest fan of Gnome but the newer versions have made so many improvements, I don’t think I could stand using 42.9.
is it really gnome 43+ that’s better or that it has better wayland support?
Wayland on Gnome 42 worked well enough for me, I definitely think the newer versions have made good improvements to Gnome itself, it just feels way more polished. The last 5 Gnome releases have so many improvements and are just way more polished. Some I can think of are the files refresh, quick settings redesign, new activities indicator (which would be especially useful with PopOS’s tiling plugin) and that’s just what I can think of between 42 and 45, when I stopped using it, I’m sure 46 and 47 have more. 48 will also soon be releasing with triple buffering support, which I love on laptops.