For me it was partially Windows 10 placing suggested apps and ads in the UI. The other part was just curiosity. After some distro hopping I landed on Mint, then Fedora and finally Arch where I’ve been for about two or three years.

Just to be an absolute rebel; Solus

Chimera is the bees-knees. I’ve got my son’s computer configured with it and have had zero complaints, it just plays games and makes working roms/emulation so easy.

+1 for Nobara. All the optimizations make some significant differences in frametimes in my experience.

I’ll check it out, I do have something on hand though that I’m thinking of going with. As any self respecting “computer guy” I have waaay too many towers around the house and am right now planning to try to use an optiplex 5040 MT as a proxmox box running a pfsense VM and maybe some storage too.

EDIT: Fixed some typos/grammar

Nice, I’ve also thought of installing PFsense on it and using it as my home router. But that seems like kind of waste of its potential. It’s perfectly sized for that purpose though.

AMD, easily. Its literally plug and play. You can even pick some second hand options for cheap that are still solid for gaming such as the vega 56/64 and the RX 5700XT (which is I use). Intel isn’t bad so long as you’re not playing the newest stuff, my Arc a750 is solid in games like Fallout 4 and Elden Ring. Starfield is complete mess on it. Another thing with Intel is you’ll need a distro with a 6+ kernel to get the most out of it.

I had this hunt earlier this year myself; ended up going with the Acer Nitro 5 15. Its fully user upgradeable with DDR4 RAM, two m2 drives and even a 2.5 in drive. And it has a TB3 port for charging and works with external graphics as well. Everything worked under linux right out of the box.

Yea I’ve got the same GPU and its normally very capable of high settings with everything I normally play but Starfield is kind of a bear it seems.

I was so surprised to have this running day one, just had to switch to proton hotfix and it was off to the races!