Hi! I’m getting a new laptop any day now and I plan on going back to Linux after maybe a decade on Windows. What works best for gaming nowadays? Is manjaro good for that? I prefer a distro with a nice name but of course that’s not the central thing. I’ll also do some book keeping, writing et cetera but I don’t think it’s much to worry about. I also hope to use my Valve Index on it.
Depends on your system/setup. Though, you should be able to get it to work on most distros (eventually). Consider checking out https://linux-hardware.org/ to see which distros are known to work for your new laptop. Personally, I’m inclined to believe that Bazzite is the most hands-free solution for most people. However, other good options include Linux Mint and Pop!_OS.
I really wonder where newcomers get to know about Manjaro 😜. Manjaro does a bunch of good stuff and has in the past been great for providing a platform by which Arch Linux (Manjaro is based on Arch) could be (relatively) easily consumed. However, Manjaro has since tarnished its own branding (see Manjarno). Hence, I find it hard to recommend it ever since.
You should be fine unless you need specific software (that’s not available on Linux) to do those things on. For most software there are decent alternatives; https://alternativeto.net/ might be a helpful resource in that regard.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any experiences on that. Therefore I abstain from giving any further comments. Wish ya good luck with that though!
Honestly my main issue with Manjaro is still that they hold updates for a week or two for “testing” which tends to break certain AUR packages. I’d be less mad if the testing actually amounted to anything, but half the time they basically do nothing, and if there were any bugs Arch has released updates that resolve them already, which you won’t get for another week because of their update schedule. Anytime anyone talks about being interested in Manjaro, I just recommend they get EndeavorOS instead, it’s basically stock arch with a fancy installer and sane defaults which is great for anyone who mostly knows what they’re doing with Linux (or is at least capable of opening a terminal window and pasting error messages into google or, failing that, ChatGPT and following basic instructions)
Thank you!