Most of my friends already know, and if you read some of my posts here you can probably guess that I am an avid Linux user, currently running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Unity 7. But for the last years I always was dual-booting with a Windows partition. The reasons were many, but it mostly comes down to some games not running on Linux, either because there is no native version or they do not run in Wine (I look at you Witcher 3 you bloody bastard). The last game that kept me dualbooting was the rebooted Doom, which is an awesome game.
It was quite ridiculous that they did not provide a native Linux version so far, like all the past ID games, although the game uses OpenGL (or Vulkan) and should be easy to port over. One thing that was a deal breaker here is the DRM system in use, Denuvo is known not to have a native Linux implementation. But ID had a lot of problems with Denuvo anyway and subsequently decided to drop Denuvo at the end of 2016. That was the time where the folks over at Wine released their long awaited version 2 with DX11, OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan support (through Wine-Staging packages), and now Doom is running just fine in Wine with Vulkan API.
So I have not booted into my Windows 10 for the whole of 2017 so far as I did not need to, and the idea of deleting the Windows partition grows in me. I despise Microsoft and all of Windows 10, and don't want to use it anymore (Shady privacy stuff, forced updates, omni-present telemetry, and lack of features, just to name to important few).
But staying on Ubuntu also seems to be a bad idea, 'cause Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu is now best friends with Microsoft (their is now a Ubuntu shell subsystem in Windows 10) and more recently announced they want to drop their Desktop environment Unity, 'cause reasons. As Unity DE was the main reason for me to stay on Ubuntu, this not only made me question Microsoft, but also my Linux of choice: Ubuntu.
Still not totally convinced leaving my comfort zone, the last coffin nails for Windows and Ubuntu seem to just happened these days. Microsoft started deploying the new Creators Update, again with shady privacy options reverted back to "Microsoft defaults" and stuff.
The other was the release of the new Unigine Superposition Benchmark. The Unigine Benchmarks are the goto benchmarks for Linux gamers, as it is the only serious gaming benchmark for Linux. After downloading the 2GB package and running it in 1080p extreme settings I was shocked. My system got only a mere 1100-something score, whereas another guy (the amazing HexDSL) in the Linux Gamer Community with nearly exact same hardware and drivers got over 1500.
The main difference were the Kernel versions, me sitting on Kernel 4.4 from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and him using Kernel 4.10 on Antergos. That got me thinking again. (Could it be that staying on an LTS seriously degrades my performance for gaming?)
Full of questions, I sought help from the guys and girls in the Linux gamers group over at Discord. After quite some entertaining and amusing conversations, I decided to test out two new distros to see if one of these can become my new safe haven away from Microsoft and Canonical. Three things were my major decision points here: first, it should be a rolling release system to get up-to-date software, Kernel and drivers, should run well with Steam, GOG-games and Wine (PlayOnLinux and Lutris), and third it should have some good desktop environments (not KDE, it is to Windows-ish).
My choices boiled down to Antergos, an Arch-based distro with good Installer and out-of-the-box experience, and Solus, a native Linux distro optimized for Desktop PCs. At least so I heard.
As I heard only good tales about the AUR system in Arch based distros (AUR = Arch User Repositories, something like Launchpad for Ubuntu but better) and how fast it has the newest packages, and the ability to build packages from Github sources, and Solus is still lacking a working nfs-utils package to mount my NAS shares, I decided to go with Antergos first. Let's see where these adventures will take me. #Decisions! :D
Stay tuned for more, Cheers!
