Gathering info on what to do before and after installing

General system Newbie
1

Hello, this is gonna be quite a long post (i think) so please bear with me.
I’ve been thinking alot on whether or not to use arch/arch-based distros but the “duty” of maintenance and careful considerations when updating are one of the few things that hold me back. My first ever distro was vanilla fedora and I’ve switched on and off between pop!os and vanilla fedora. But I quickly found out that even though pop!os is great and stable, I couldn’t appreciate it since some of the things I use require updated packages and the defaults from the package manager are not, given that it’s an LTS kernel. Around late november last year I’ve discovered a “gaming centric” distro called Nobara which is based on fedora. Me being an avid gamer myself and already familiar with fedora, was interested and tried it out and lo and behold it’s my new daily driver.

One of the things I like on a distro is when the package manager asks you the option to install any possible missing multimedia codecs for you either after setup or there will be an option found later on, since I’m not very keen on what specific codecs I need. Also, coming from fedora, I’ve only ever used BTRFS (albeit I haven’t really dug deep into what it really is) so having the option to choose between different file systems may confuse me.

And so here comes the main part, we have a CTF (capture the flag) competition coming up in a few days and friends from other universities told me that the only linux distros tested by the organizers that work are: ubuntu, debian, and arch. So it was either I go back to pop!os or try endeavour. This competition means alot to me, and being that my current distro is fedora-based, I don’t want to risk having problems during the day of the competition.

So I want to know what are some of the things i need to know before installing and do you guys have any suggestions on what to get after installation? I’ve read two articles,(this one helped a lot but maybe some of you guys have other ideas?

A short insight of my current setup(like what i use and things):

  • I use it for gaming (few games that i actively play: quaver, god eater 3, world of tanks blitz, honkai star rail, osu)
  • I have some dev work (student coding) at hand
  • HP laptop, 8gb ram, intel core i7 10th gen, intel iris plus integrated gpu
  • BTRFS file system
  • 'm used to timeshift as a snapshot tool
  • bash shell
  • yt-dlp
  • some flatpaks like haruna, vesktop, etc.
2

Then just pick btrfs. :slight_smile:

Unlike Fedora, which takes a very aggressive stance on patents, we install the most common codecs by default. If you need something other than that, it should be pretty obvious because the media will fail to play.

If you want hardware accelerated playback of video there may be a little work to do. See here for the details.

There isn’t really a fixed list. If gaming is your priority, you could take a look at this guide.

You can use timeshift on EOS. I would recommend choosing grub in the installer to make timeshift rollbacks easier.

You probably won’t need many flatpaks here. The repos + AUR provide a pretty wide range of software.

If you choose the plasma desktop, we install haruna by default.

3 Likes
3

thank you for the swift reply : D

is there an indicator on what codec/s needed?

also do you have any personal suggestions you might wanna add? or any tips that you personally feel useful?

4

No, but it is usually not that hard to figure out or you just ask here and we can tell you if you tell us how the file is encoded.

I wrote the guide you posted above so I put most of my tips in there.

1 Like
5

ok that helps alot ty : D

1 Like