...and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I'm mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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Haha, yes!
I went with Pop!_OS
Pop_OS I s a great first "it just works" experience.
But also, don't be af aid to be a bit of a distro slut. I've been distro hopping lately and it's very liberating.
If you want to try another, "it just works" experience, I highly recommend bazzite. It doesn't exactly work for me because of the immutability, and I run high end hardware in weird configurations, Ill need to hop in and wrench on things from time to time. But I installed it in my exploration last week and found it immensely pleasurable.
If anyone wants to provide some guidance for how to overcome some of the issues immutability creates (I need specific versions of ollama and rocm), I could really use the help.
This is my hope. I figure I'll use this until I find some niche reason to need something else.
I saw a lot of positive talk about Bazzite too.
Bazzite looks pretty cool, Iβm setting up a computer for my friendβs from my old PC parts and might set up either that or Pop_OS on it
Of course never an issue with just sticking with Pop. It's a great distro to start with but also a great distro to die with after many years of love.
Most distro are the same just with different defaults anyhow. Bazzite would be the exception though lol (also a great choice to be clear)
The biggest thing I've heard people suggest (and I've been using) is to install distrobox. I use it to install some fussy apps that otherwise would have been a dealbreaker. Maybe that helps?
https://youtu.be/eiDt4O6UPRw
I'll give it a shot, but tbh, it's been a bit of a slog. I'm on the new Z13, the 128gb variant.
I can't find an "it just works" variant where both ollama and rocm play nice on the hardware AND the mediatek card works correctly. It's either I'm able to self host fullsize llms (and do the rest of my ml work) OR I get fully functional wifi.
I've got the whole install process for ollama + rocm + openwebui all set on Ubuntu, but the wifi card is barely getting 20 mbps. But access to rocm (and I assume it will be the same in pytorch) is buttery smooth and I can run medium models in the range of hundreds of tokens per second locally.
When I throw on bazzite I'm hitting 350 mbps down but it doesn't seem like it's got the right rocm/ driver/ kernel/ ollama combo because I'm not even able to get 5 tps.
It's worth a try, you should be able to run an Ubuntu image in distrobox to install the ollama tools
I concur, I went with bazzite for my daily driver and it's been the best yet, I prefer it over the others I've tried: Arch, SteamOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, and OpenSuse.
It's got downsides, but I just really like it.
I'm using its non-gaming sister, Bluefin, and same. While I'm pretty decent at the CLI and have laboriously figured out how to make things work in the past, that's not where I want to put my energy. I like that it just works and I'm not going to mess anything up on the system level. Containerization and rollbacks are fine by me if I don't have to figure out how to un-bork something.
I was on on Pop, but after going to CachyOS I have not looked back. The fact Pop was kind of dated snd the new DE seemingly taking forever to finish made me want to try something else. CachyOS so far has been entirely trouble free and worked better than Pop, which was struggling with stuff like hibernation on my machine
Good first choice! Glad you like it :)
Try Manjaro please
As someone who tries manjaro first, don't. Endeavouros has been a much better experience overall for me.
Are there any things you could mention specifically?
I'm using Manjaro with KDE, and I find it extremely easy to maintain, which I like.
I use mostly Steam for games, and it runs very well out of the box, even better than I ever managed with Arch.
I used Antergos for a couple of years, and that was also great, but it quickly fell apart when it was discontinued although I tried to remove the Antergos dependencies, I don't want to experience that again with EndeavourOS which was started by the same people.
Why should I trust EndeavourOS when I couldn't trust Antergos?
Someone else could (and has in other threads where manjaro came up) answer better than me for general reasons, but for reasons that personally affected me - version mismatches due to them holding back releases, driver issues (with an amd card), general app installation/updating issues.
Audio issues due to poor defaults, which as a beginner (at the time) user was difficult enough to diagnose I uninstalled plasma (twice) trying to fix (yes, that part is my fault for not understanding what pacman -Rcns actually does).
The installer is using a very incomplete timezone list that does not include any GMT -8 timezones at all (which isn't manjaro specific, but makes me leery of a dev's attention to detail when they use this list).
For the general comments I have seen others mention, they have accidentally ddos'd the AUR on more than one occasion, they let certs expire regularly, they hold back updates without actually doing anything to confirm the updates are stable when they do push the updates...
As for endeavouros devs being part of a discontinued project, I can't say anything that would bring back your trust as I am not part of that team, but they did do a write up about this on the endeavouros website.
Thanks for your very thorough answer. ππ
I haven't had any of those issues myself, I also use AMD and have for many years, everything always worked fine with the default setup.
Some years back I too changed Pulse audio settings, not because the defaults were bad, as I remember it, it was pretty much Pulse audio default settings they used.
But in early days there could be problems with Wine that required higher priority for Pulse audio, and some fine tuning of buffer settings that may be hardware specific.
There is however one thing that annoys me with Manjaro, and that is that updates sometimes overwrite config settings I have manually made changes to. Arch generally didn't do that as I recall, but made a notice about the config file from the update being copied with a different name to preserve manual settings, which is excellent.
I'll check out what they write about discontinuing Antergos. But for now it's kind of a "if it works don't fix it" situation for me.
Please don't use manjaro. Their devs are incompetant, rarely change after fucking up, it teaches bad behaviors, and they detriment the broader ecosystem constantly.
Too tired to go through with the entire list of constant fuck ups but they're really awful. I rarely say that any distro is a poor choice but manjaro is just awful.
If you want a semi-stable rolling release opensuse tumbleweed is a good option.
No. Please go away
I'm not talking to you. Fuck off.