Had a slow day yesterday so thought, why not wipe the gaming PC and put Linux on it.
I work with Linux every day for work so I wanted a debian-based distro as that’s what I’m most familiar with. After a short impulsive-driven search, I picked pika-os. Never heard of it but thought I’d give it a go.
Picked KDE, installed the OS, booted first time and immediately regretted it. No network. I have a 2.5G Realtek 8125 nic and whilst it was detected, it was showing RX packets as “dropped”. Couldn’t install firmware-realtek as it conflicted with linux-firmware. Tried the Realtek website, what a mess that is, compiled a driver, couldn’t get it to load. Ended up finding a git repo that created .deb packages for all realtek drivers.
Got network up and running and its all been great from there. Last time I tried this in 2021 I had loads of issues but so far, other than having to download a later version of Proton and select it in a game, or add some command-line arguments in Steam, its been great!
I’m so surprised that every app I normally use on Windows is either available as a Linux native app, works with emulation (bottles) or there is a decent alternative.
Definitely, 100%, the Linux desktop is ready.
Just a fair warning, PikaOS is a hobby project. The authors of this distribution make it very clear with a warning message when you install it. They’ll try to maintain it as best they can, but provide no guarantee.
It’s nice for messing around or if it’s for a dedicated gaming PC or device, but it’s a terrible idea as a daily driver.
Either way, I hope you enjour it!
Thanks. This pc is just games. It’s only turned on when I want to game. It gets used twice a week, if I’m lucky. If I were to put Linux on my main machine it would be direct Debian.