Arch isn’t exactly intended for beginners, and the “windows is more bloated than Linux” thing applies for pretty much every Linux distro.

If you’re willing to spend a significant amount of time learning and tinkering, a distro like Arch could provide what you need. However, if you’re just starting out, you might want to start with something easier. Distros like Linux Mint or Fedora are plenty lightweight compared to Windows, and they require much less learning to get started actually using your computer.

As for “which distro allows you to use the cheapest PC”, this mainly comes down to how much effort you’re willing to put in, not necessarily the distro you use. At a certain point, a desktop computer will “just work” for basic desktop tasks, the distro doesn’t change much there.

If I had to pick one, Arch. I already use it a lot, so it’s familiar. I know my way around the package manager and how to create packages, so even when things aren’t available for Arch out of the box, I can make it work.

It’d be kind of a hassle trying to keep anywhere close to 100% server uptime, but for my own personal stuff that shouldn’t be that big of an issue, as I can fix it when I have the time.

For desktop, I basically can’t do stable release. I frequently mess with new projects requiring the latest versions of everything, which is a near impossible task on stable-release distros.

It’s the task of your CPU scheduler to ensure your system doensn’t freeze, even over 100% CPU usage. If it’s completely unresponsive, it’s more likely you’re running out of memory instead.

In my experience, the Debian installer is just confusing. Once you’re past that, the userbase is smaller than Ubuntu’s. Their repos are different too, meaning software packaged for Ubuntu isn’t guaranteed to work on Debian. Ubuntu itself is pretty terrible for its own reasons, so when asked for a desktop Linux distribution “close to Ubuntu” I’d put Mint first. (For general recommendation, I’d probably say Fedora now.)

Debian 13 is still relatively new, so the problems of it being out of date aren’t showing yet. Debian 12 just before 13 released had tons of these issues, like glibc being too old for some binary programs, or the kernel not being new enough for some “gaming” features.

For reference, I am on Arch Linux. I feel I have a good understanding of how to manually install Linux. The Debian installer confused me in many ways, the main one being that “language and region” are closely tied, and selecting en_US “language” forces you to choose an American timezone later in the installer. In general it was a slow install process too. This is something other “user friendly” distros handle much better. A default live environment, a quick installation, and options being there, but having the defaults automatically correct (like timezone).

Like (almost) every other distro, Debian has its own benefits and downsides. These make it a good fit on desktop for slightly more experienced users, or users familiar with apt. This means it isn’t in the list of distros I’d generally recommend to people when they’re not familiar with Linux.

Matrix (Synapse with Element) can be self-hosted for free, though they have optional paid plans for enterprises. The main goal of Matrix is federation (connecting with other servers), though this can be turned off completely. This is probably the most “business” look/feel you can get fully FOSS, if that’s what you’re looking for.

XMPP has more clients/servers, and is more for the technically oriented end user. I can’t really give recommendations here, as I haven’t extensively used XMPP.

Spacebar (formerly Fosscord) is a Discord clone (API compatibility as a goal) that can be selfhosted.

I use whatsapp for communicating with a few groups of people who are refusing to switch over. I’m not getting them to move, they’re a mix of tech illiterate, ignorant, or just unwilling. These groups have important annoucements in them, that I’m unable to receive any other way. Sometimes there’s just no way around services like these.

I do my best to protect myself (no proprietary facebook code ever runs on my main device), and keep personal information I provide to a minimum (as I don’t trust Facebook’s E2EE claims). There’s not much more I can do besides not receiving important announcements.

CachyOS has a structure that’s much closer to Arch than Manjaro, but they still replace the majority of Arch repos with their own. I’ve seen both their repos and the optimizations they apply being the root cause of issues on some friends installs.

Use whatever you’re comfortable with, and what you know works.

On that note, Manjaro and CachyOS don’t work. You should avoid them. They both make changes that harm reliability, and both frequently make avoidable mistakes (especially Manjaro). If you need something like those two, EndeavourOS is a better option, or just base Arch Linux.

Arch Linux itself is a good distro, but made for a specific target audience. If you want to tinker with your system and learn along the way, it may be a good option for you. If you want to “set and forget” your media center PC, a stable-release distro like Debian or Rocky might be better options for you.

This website has some good resources for Linux VR and links some support channels: https://lvra.gitlab.io/

A device driver needs access to the system to control a device. There’s a couple ways of going about it, but GPUs are effectively required to use a kernel driver. A kernel driver runs as part of your system, and crashes have different effects from normal programs. If a normal program crashes, the system handles that, the program closes, too bad. If the kernel crashes, nothing can catch that, and your whole computer crashes.

That being said, with this little info on the crash there’s nothing anyone can do except speculate on the cause. It could be hardware, it could be the kernel. Whatever it is, you’d need more information (journalctl -b -1 after a crash and reboot) to diagnose this issue.

Though important to note; if holding the power button for an extended period of time (30s) doesn’t shut down the computer, it is most likely a hardware fault.

It depends heavily on headset. From what I hear, standalones with WiVRN or Steam Link work fine ootb, not much different than desktop gaming with Proton. I have a Valve Index, a PCVR headset. Getting it to run (properly) is a pain. Monado is making it easier, but it’s not 1 to 1 the same experience as on Windows.

Been using it for a couple years, my main ones currently are:

• VR. SteamVR is a broken mess, Monado is pretty much functional, but I haven’t switched yet. Mesa or the kernel sometimes forget about VR and break it in an update.
• QT5 to QT6 transition for my favorite Matrix client, Nheko. Scrolling is a pain, and the clipboard randomly stops working.
• Wayland freedom and featureset is nowhere close to X11. I can’t choose a window manager without locking myself in to a specific featureset on my display server. Stuff like global hotkeys isn’t supported in most applications. I’m still on the godawful GNOME desktop portals, which is most annoying for file picking. I have no HDR support because my window manager isn’t from KDE or GNOME.
• GTK4 apps looking like shit (there are patches luckily), I try to avoid them just because of libadwaita and GNOME’s awful design.

On the note of Wayland, I have switched, and for good reason. Besides unimplemented features, things “just work” a lot better than X11. Still wish I could have effectively bspwm window management with kwin featureset though. (Plugins for tiling are not the same experience)

I’ve seen many default docker-compose configurations provided by server software that expose the ports of stuff like databases by default (which exposes it on all host interfaces). Even outside docker, a lot of software, has a default configuration of “listen on all interfaces”.

I’m also not saying “evil haxxors will take you over”. It’s not the end of the world to have a service requiring authentication exposed to the internet, but it’s much better to only expose what should be public.

UFW works well, and is easy to configure. UFW is a great option if you don’t need the flexibility (and insane complexity) that manually managing iptables rules offers,

The job of a reverse proxy like nginx is exactly this. Take traffic coming from one source (usually port 443 HTTPS) and forward it somewhere else based on things like the (sub)domain. A HTTPS reverse proxy often also forwards the traffic as HTTP on the local machine, so the software running the service doesn’t have to worry about ssl.

Be sure to get yourself a firewall on that machine. VPSes are usually directly connected to the internet without NAT in between. If you don’t have a firewall, all internal services will be accessible, stuff like databases or the internal ports of the services you host.

Most likely yes, and if it works, this is one of the easier options (without needing to develop anything or change workflow). However, not all devices work properly with this. iPhones on iTunes are particularly difficult, as (iirc) they sometimes change device ID immediately after connecting/initializing. If you pass through a specific “USB Host Device”, an iPhone connected to a Windows VM with iTunes may not work.

If you pass through an entire USB controller, like an extra PCIe card or one from your motherboard (if it has multiple), this method should work on any USB device with any Windows tools/drivers.

If a Linux native method exists (which it does according to other comments), that is usually easier to set up than a VM with USB passthrough, but it might change the workflow.

You need a couple things:

• The kernel driver (dkms)
• Userspace component
• Kernel headers (for dkms)

First get your kernel headers, this is easy enough, but varies based on which kernel you have installed. The format of the package name is {kernel}-headers. If you have the linux kernel, get linux-headers. If you have linux-lts, get linux-lts-headers. If you’re not sure on this, the command pacman -Q | grep linux searches for installed packages containing linux in the name. If you have multiple kernels installed, get the headers for all of them.

Then install (from AUR) at least nvidia-580xx-dkms (display out) and nvidia-580xx-utils (Acceleration, like 3D and video decoding). If you have Steam or play Windows games under Wine, be sure to get lib32-nvidia-580xx-utils too.

Also of note is the order in which you install things. Having the kernel headers installed is important for the DKMS modules to install succesfully. If you already have nvidia-580xx-dkms but were missing your kernel headers, you should reinstall it after installing your kernel headers.

It’s an old blog post, but this doesn’t look very good for System76. At the same time, GNOME (and GTK) is refusing to implement basic features. Stuff like server side window decorations, because they can’t “tolerate” SSD. The hard enforcing of Adwaita theming might make sense in GNOME, but on devices not 100% in the GNOME ecosystem, libadwaita apps have awful UX. I do not want shit like Zenity to take up 50% of my screen space for 3 words and 2 buttons, yet libadwaita enforces it.

As long as you use an AUR helper to update your system (replace pacman -Syu with yay -Syu), and keep the kernel EOLs in your calendar, it shouldn’t be constant babysitting. Updating a (non -bin) kernel from the AUR requires compiling the kernel, which makes updates take way longer, but doesn’t require extra manual maintenance.

You can find when a kernel is EOL on kernel.org. When your chosen LTS goes out of support, you should update (for security reasons). You’ll have to hope the 580 nvidia drivers still support the newer kernel version you move to.

This path allows you to run your setup for as long as possible on Arch, when you run into issues with nvidia support, so does every other distro.