My two cents; if you want to use Linux on it, then do yourself a favor and pick a laptop from a Linux-first vendor. So the likes of NovaCustom, Star Labs, System76, Tuxedo and others found on the link over here come to mind. Besides that, it's important that the device in question either has a dedicated GPU (or at least supports eGPUs). Furthermore, choose a device with relatively high battery capacity; they go up to ~99 Wh, so pick something that's at least relatively close to that number.
openSUSE's Richard Brown has given multiple talks over the years comparing these three. I'd suggest anyone to look at those for a great rundown on how these universal package managers compare to one another. His most recent talk can be found here; in which he actually does some kind of recap as well.
Unfortunately, we live in the reality in which an affordable laptop with open source (yet modern) hardware simply doesn't exist. While the likes of Insurgo, NitroPad, NovaCustom, Purism, Star Labs, System76 and Tuxedo do commendable work on the software side of things; they still leave a lot to be desired as there is currently no laptop counterpart to what Raptor Computing Systems is able to achieve on the desktop.
Obviously I applaud Framework for what they've achieved for the "right to repair" and hope they'll at least pave the way for what's possible within the realm of open source hardware on laptops. Unfortunately, I'm a bit pessimistic as the way they've handled coreboot up till now has been far from desirable. But I'd love to be mistaken on this.
As other have already alluded to, any distro with a lightweight desktop environment should work on that laptop. However, we don't know if it would work out for you; simply for the fact that you haven't given any other information.
- uBlock Origin: On medium mode. Honestly, the internet mostly sucks without this excellent extension.
- Dark Reader: Easy on your eyes and prolongs battery life on OLED displays.
- Redirector: This allows you to be in full control of which sites/urls you redirect and to where. As it allows the use of regex, you're even able to create your own 'bangs'. For example I used !x as a bang to redirect me to my favorite SearXNG instance. Kinda neat.
They're overrated today because they were good at some time in the past and people have to catch up. As for why they're not that good right now:
Elementary OS had at some point in time perhaps the most polished and accessible user interface out of any distro out there. This was mostly due to how much time and effort they had put into their in-house Pantheon desktop environment. And if they would have continued their efforts, then it would have continued to flourish. Unfortunately it failed at keeping their momentum, this is most likely related to internal disputes. I say this because over the years a lot of important members from their team have departed. Right now; it's just a shadow of what it once used to be and the likes of GNOME, KDE and Cinnamon have far surpassed their Pantheon.
While Elementary OS is just plain bad at this point, by contrast Manjaro is actually not that bad. Arguably, it does a lot of good things; Btrfs+Timeshift being one of the big ones. However, freezing packages in a rolling release doesn't make any sense. Furthermore, it's just very unprofessional to let the SSL certificates expire. Mind you; it didn't happen just once or twice, but four times?!?! Today, if one wants a stable rolling release that holds their hands, they should use openSUSE Tumbleweed. If they want to use Arch, then they should just use Arch; archinstall
exists. And if one is not able to install Arch using archinstall
, then they should question themselves if Arch is even the right distro for them. Finally, if they seek any kind of hand-holding, then there's a plethora of derivative distros of Arch that are as good, if not better than Manjaro. So just to make myself very clear; Manjaro is not bad, it's just overrated; people gravitate too much towards it based on old videos/articles and what not, but it doesn't deserve that gravitation in its current state.
Elementary OS and Manjaro are the big ones IMO. Sure, they've had their heydays, but it's time to move on.
'Spins' on Fedora Silverblue had -for some time- been following a naming scheme that involved picking the name of a blue mineral that ended on "ite". We see this in for example its KDE-spin Fedora Kinoite -which (inadvertently) happens to be the one starting this trend- and the unofficial spins of Vauxite (Xfce), Sodalite (Pantheon) and thus Bazzite (Gaming/Steam Deck). However, the official Sway-spin (Fedora Sericea) and the upcoming Budgie-spin (Fedora Onyx) don't quite follow this naming scheme 😅.
Yes, ideally a naming scheme that's a lot more descriptive would be awesome; like say Fedora Atomic GNOME or Fedora Atomic KDE etc.
Linux is a platform that allows you the freedom to acquire the perfect OS for your needs; Linux Mint for your elderly mother, ChimeraOS for the Steam Deck of your son, Debian for your server, Ubuntu on your laptop you use for work and we can't forget your fully customized Arch/Gentoo on your self-built PC that has been optimized to perfection for your workflow. Whatever problem/use-case/need you might have for your device, Linux offers solutions that are quite possibly the best there is; your mileage may vary depending on your knowledge and experience*.
I wouldn't call a project with over 6k upvotes (and counting) on Github underappreciated. Perhaps what you tried to convey is that -surprisingly enough- the community is split on how they view Distrobox within the grand scheme of things. I simply can't fathom anyone to be unappreciative of what it achieves and how. However, there are those that might regard it as one of the rising stars that represent a big upcoming change that might even be -in their eyes- an existential threat to Linux. They fear that containers, immutable distros and all of that 'mumbo jumbo' will threaten the freedom in which they interact with their systems. They don't see them as (potential) solutions to long-held problems, but instead they are viewed as invasive to Linux and an attempt to **-ify Linux and thus as an assault to Linux' uniquely strong qualities. I wonder if if this might be somehow philosophically rooted in how some people lean towards conservatism, while others lean towards progressivism instead.
But yeah, Distrobox is excellent.
I would like to ask if openSuse Tumbleweed is a good option for daily driving ang gaming.
Definitely! Depending on your hardware configuration and the games you play, it might even give you a significant performance boost. For completeness' sake, it's important to note that most of the (potential) gains in performance are related to having a more recently released kernel. So similar gains would have been had simply by using something like Arch or Fedora. Furthermore, other factors -like scheduler, custom kernel patches for additional performance and how the packages have been compiled etc- are perhaps also avenues worth exploring in that regard. However that's a potential can of worms I would rather keep closed in this discussion.
Furthermore, openSUSE Tumbleweed comes with great defaults, which is in clear contrast to Arch that comes with (little to) no defaults. This makes it significantly easier to just install and get on with business, something which you might be already familiar with if you've used Linux Mint and Ubuntu. However, compared to those, openSUSE Tumbleweed might require you to perform some additional steps related to codecs and whatnot. This is nothing out of the ordinary as Fedora would have required it as well. Out of 'the big bois', only Ubuntu has been able to solve this through a single-click during installation. Note; this is not a technical matter but a legal one. Thankfully, openSUSE offers great documentation to solve this as smoothly as possible.
Perhaps it's worth mentioning that openSUSE Tumbleweed, contrary to all the other distros that have been mentioned, is configured with Snapper+Btrfs out of the box. This is IMO a must-have on any reliable system as it allows one to rollback to a working system whenever your system seems to have been borked somehow. The other distros allow you to set this (or similar solutions) up yourself, however openSUSE is the only one that does this for you. Furthermore, if security is of any concern to you, but you're not that knowledgeable on the subject, thus requiring your distro to do the heavy-lifting, then once again openSUSE Tumbleweed (together with Fedora) performs best out of 'the big bois'.
After mentioning such praise one might ask "What's the catch?", because -somehow- openSUSE Tumbleweed isn't as represented in the online discourse compared to Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. And honestly, I don't know why it is so criminally underrated. So in that regard, it's quite unfortunate that it can't quite reap the benefits of having a huge involved community like the others have. And perhaps that's where the catch is...; it doesn't have as big of a user base -> limited user base isn't able to contribute to it so that it becomes as 'competitive' as the more popular distros -> potential new users don't pick or stick to openSUSE because package/function X (or whatever) is absent -> it doesn't have as big of a user base... To give an example; I really like to have a secure system. And while openSUSE is one of the best to offer that out of the box, it unfortunately doesn't allow me to further harden it by installing a hardened kernel without myself becoming the maintainer of said package. This is in clear contrast to Arch, Debian and Fedora that offer access to repos that contain a hardened kernel; be it through the AUR, COPR or the repo maintained by the folks over at Kicksecure.
The graphics card I have is Nvidia if its any relevant.
Perhaps openSUSE Tumbleweed will require you to put in more effort -compared to Ubuntu- to make sure this works as intended. However, thankfully, the documentation has got you covered.
OP, my request/suggestion would be the following:
In order for us to better help you consider the following:
On a more general note, you shouldn't feel the need to switch distros even if other distros might offer more convenient solutions.
Story time
When I was new to Linux, I wanted to rely on the Chromium browser for cloud gaming through Nvidia GeForce NOW's web platform. For some reason, I just wasn't able to get this to work on Fedora. Somehow, while still being mostly a newbie, I stumbled upon Distrobox and decided to give it a go in hopes of allowing me to overcome the earlier challenge by benefiting of the ArchWiki and the AUR through an Arch distrobox. And voila; -without too much effort- it just worked. More recently, after I've become slightly more knowledgeable on Linux, I just rely on a flatpak to get the same work done.Moral of the story would be that there are a lot of different ways that enable one to overcome challenges like these. And unless you feel the need to go with a system that's (mostly) managed for you (à la uBlue)^[1]^, you will face issues every now and then. And the only way to deal with them would be to either setup^[2]^ (GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper (or similar solutions) such that it automatically snapshots a working state that you might rollback to whenever something unfortunate befalls your system or to simply become ever so better equipped in troubleshooting them yourself.