manjaro is very common especially for gamers check distrowatch for current trends , endeavouros is basically manjaro just with less preinstalled apps and longer update cycle
ubuntu fall out from the top 3 years ago

yep really, I use manjaro atm like many do, shouldnt be a problem if linux desktops world would be more matured
and standardized, this is clearly a problem with fragmentation due to too many distros

as Ive read steam had 2 years to update their dependencies, they failed to do that :I

Manjaro is popular but distrowatch's top is absolutely meaningless as it's based only on clicks on their site and skewed by bots. I mean mx linux is top 1 according to them for years now, seriously?

Steam works great for me in Linux Mint (19.2). Even better than in Windows 7 nowadays.

I used to play Team Fortress 2 (an online shooter on Steam) primarily on Windows 7, but increasingly there has been these stutters, pauses and lagging when playing it in Windows 7.

I first thought, could my PC be overheating and that is a sign of thermal throttling, but it didn't seem so. So I opened the Task Manager to another monitor while I played TF2, and there are these odd, short 100% CPU spikes that happen quite often, and that is when TF2 starts stuttering. I couldn't tell from the Task Manager what it is that is causing those short CPU spikes, they are very annoying, destroying the gameplay.

On that same PC on Linux Mint 19.2, Steam + Team Fortress 2 work pretty much flawlessly. I opened the (Linux) Task Manager there too, and there are no CPU spikes, both the CPU and RAM utilization stay pretty low and constant, offering smooth gameplay for TF2.

well if you have a better list feel free to post

No. The wealth of distros is Linux' strength, not its weakness.

When Canonical did something with Ubuntu that I didn't like, I had the option to move to e.g. Linux Mint, which is where I am even today.

When Red Hat decided to kill CentOS 8, people still had an option to move to other Linux distros, or even Oracle Linux 8 which is pretty much the same as CentOS 8 (and RHEL8, but RHEL8 costs money...). And I think there is also the Rocky Linux on its way, to be a good alternative for CentOS.

Also the wealth of Linux distros allowed me to revive an ancient, 32-bit 1-core CPU / 1 GB RAM Dell laptop to productive work, as I can run Q4OS Linux on it, which is a very low-resource hungry, 32bit Linux distro specifically made for such extremely low-spec PCs, and promises to support 32bit CPUs for many more years. Could I install Windows 10 on that same laptop? Now that laptop acts as a standalone. small time (S)FTP-server, specifically for updating certain router firmwares every now and then. Heck it doesn't even have a hard drive as its old PATA HDD got fried, but that Q4OS Linux is running fine from a mere 8GB USB memory stick.

Odd anyway that you would complain about the wealth of Linux distros, and then choosing one that is not apparently even officially supported by Valve. If you are fine restricting yourself only to one distro, why didn't you just go to Ubuntu, and stay there? No one is stopping you from doing that, if you hate the idea of being able to choose another Linux distro.

You are like that whiny kid who complained there are too many ice cream flavors to choose from, so he picked salty fudge flavored ice cream and then whined it doesn't taste good, and the ice cream factory should make only one flavor of ice cream.

If you look you'll find most linux distros have much more in common than are different. 'Linux' is just the kernel, the central first process that handles IO and drivers and time management to processes.

On top of Linux is GNU, which is all the other tools needed to run the OS. (Mounting, text manipulation, filesystem creation/fixing, compression, etc) though you can get by with a stripped version if you had to (Busybox at 800k emulates nearly all the tools for slim Floppydisk distros, also used in routers and possiby phones)

Then you have on top of that, xWindows. xWindows is literally just a graphical interface, but it's barebones. So you slap a manager on top of it, Gnome, KDE, GTK, or something else. Slax uses Fluxbox (which is actually not that bad, takes a little getting used to).

Now that the 'same' parts are dealt with, you are coming to that may actually be different. The window manager, the eye candy, and some pre-installed apps to go in the theme or the purpose of the distro. Some distros are programmers tools, so will include thirty different languages and compiling tools, others will be for office or SQL work and include those programs.

But like audio management and windowing management, you start getting to the number of API's you need to support, the number of combinations quickly gets too high to be practical.



Hmmm i wonder if you wouldn't want to just use Slackware. Slackware (that i remember included 2Gb of pre-installed programs and tools, so pretty much inclues features of nearly all distros vs individual niches and configurations; Slackware also i think were one of the first ones to get LiveCD's to work, and they used compressed iso through a loopback device to fit everything onto a 700Mb CD. Though i'm guessing it's far more now.

"Because making binaries for Linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass.".

that one is a smart guy

Just pinging you to tell you that the latest Steam update fixed Steam, surprise surprise. No more black windows.

thx for the info so i can update that module now

The underlying core OS may be similar/same; But it realy depends on the programs they are set as defaults and work with. zsh works differently than csh or bash. Just think the same thing for window managers, and the API they run with. Most seem to be for eye-candy, but there's enough different types of environments that trying to support them all would be a headache. Plus each window manager likely has it's own quirks and bugs that you may have to program around.

I was reading how to make GTK applications a while back i think it was. The interface was something like you'd only be allowed to put 1 thing in an item, but you could add a 'container' that you could put multiple items. Then the layout of order of items you put in sounded a bit like HTML and more or less was decided by the GTK window manager, not by you specifically.

Sorry for dredging this thread up again.

That's ok. At least we now know Steam works on Manjaro again.

In the meantime, it has worked fine on Linux Mint all this time, no black screens or anything.

As for my Windows 7 installation, now I am unsure if it is infected by viruses at all. I ran the ClamAV scanner from the Linux partition and it found lots of allegedly infected files on the two Windows partitions... but when I ran Kaspersky Rescue Disk virus scanner from a bootable USB memory stick, I think it found only a couple "infected" files, and I am unsure if those are also false alarms because they were in a couple of MS-DOS game executables (running in DOSBox).

Also I read somewhere ClamAV scanner has the tendency to report something as infected if it is just unsure... so maybe it is just reporting lots of false positives. I dunno, but maybe I will make my Windows 7 permanently offline, just to be sure. All it means is that I won't be playing Steam or EGS games on it anymore.

Well virus scanning is going to either do exact matches, or it's going to look for patterns. AutoHotKeys has triggered many Virus software because it contains blocks of what may be used by viruses. Though if you look at how to write virus books, most of them involve direct calls to the OS so it's not any different really to a normal program. So it probably looks for two to several things found in a variety of viruses and poof flags the file.


Typical activity could include: Searching directories for file(s), opening a file for read/write, copying a block of code or a block of data. etc... usually activities too vague to identify anything.


Perhaps the most incidious viruses would be getting more memory slowly over time and eating up your memory, slowly so it isn't noticed but just being a pain and never releasing it, or writing and filling up your hard drive with some useless files with random data...