Well the build should be proceeding this week, a Ryzen 5 2400G, 16GB of RAM, 128GB NVMe and a 1TB spinning HDD.
So the most relevant question right now is what to use for a distro.
A very short background: I’ve been using Windows since 3.0, but did dual boot a few flavors of Linux years ago, including Ubuntu, Slackware (that was a very long time ago), and I think Red Hat at one point. However, I essentially consider myself a Linux noob again at this point, and beyond initial installation I’m going to be pretty clueless.
The last thing I messed with that wasn’t Windows was Raspbian (which I never got working properly) and XBMC, but the hardware was too anemic for my use-case at the time.
So what I want to do now is have a Linux system in which I can do some light gaming (I realize this is a new part and haven’t heard much about Ryzen/Vega APU drivers yet) and emulation, potential media server options and streaming box. It’ll get a Logitech wireless keyboard/touchpad (I believe that even works in the BIOS so doesn’t need any drivers) and will get plugged into a 1080 TV.
At this point, which distro should I be looking at? I’m going to be doing a lot of learning during this process too but I appreciate granularity and was never much a fan of Ubuntu but would give it a shot again if people more knowledgeable than me suggested starting with it. Qubes intrigues me, but almost certainly not going to be the best option here.
I *might *want to dual-boot with Win10 (because games), in which case I’ve heard it’s best to install Windows first and then Linux for the boot loader? Unclear on this one. I’m also open to VM’s, but the case this is going into won’t even have room for a dGPU so no passthrough learnin’s on this iteration.
Thoughts, experiences, suggestions welcome.
Tagging @wr250 because… well, Tux. What are you using and how’s it working?