Aeternalis

Fedora. It's becoming the new standard since Canonical's stunts with snaps. There's spins you can choose if you don't like the gnome DE.

I generally recommend either Pop! or Fedora nowadays. Fedora's KDE spin might be up your alley if you're looking for a similar layout to windows, but you can customize almost anything either way.

Game companies are not putting the resources into optimizing games. VRAM is only part of the issue.

This is not a good or normal thing and shouldn't ever be. Literal last gen high end GPUs shouldn't struggle on new games.

I'm a linux user so this is nice for us, but honestly this game is a perfect example of how game devs are using crutches like DLSS/FRS instead of actually optimizing games nowadays. There's no effort and time being put into optimization past "it runs on consoles, we're done".

Hard to beat the NH-D15. It's huge, but noctua is a household name in PC building for a reason.

Anyone who wants to cheat isn't going to switch to linux to do so. The far away vast majority of cheat tools were made for windows.

I spent 4 hours getting bluetooth to work on windows (and it never really 100% worked anyway, lots of lag) and 0 minutes on linux. Printers on windows are just awful, there's not much that needs to be said. Linux? Printers work OOTB. No ridiculous epson software center nonsense, no drivers that stopped being updated during vista, none of that. I had to set up a printer on windows yesterday and it made me grateful I had linux to come home to. I doubt me and you live on different planets.

I can't help but laugh when I see people using macos for work when it's by a considerable margin the worst OS you can have on a computer.

Not sure what the hardware support is like on macbooks for linux, but for basic use you could get away with really any distro with a lightweight desktop environment. Xubuntu, Mint XFCE, XFCE spin of fedora etc. I just wouldn't expect anything more than basic use and light web browsing since the CPU they put in those things was a joke even at the time.

Have no clue why people would ever recommend windows for a machine of this tier. Use a lightweight linux distro like Antix or puppy. Web browsing is still going to be slow, but it'll be a usable machine.

SteamOS is purpose build for the steam deck, and is generally pretty locked down by default because they wanted a stable base for the deck. If you want to give linux a spin in general, I'd go with Pop!_OS. Nvidia drivers are built into their ISO so no headaches. Alternatively, if you want a more windows like interface, look into something like Kubuntu or Mint XFCE.

Razer has some good products, but many of them are outclassed by alternatives (especially in the audio department). They just have way too much GAMER flair and not much else.

Looks like removing the side panel helped. Almost entirely stuck around 95c hotspot temp, max of 104 but it only hit 100 or higher 2 or 3 times total. Edge temps stayed the same. I'll keep an eye on it. I don't want to have to RMA the card for temp issues.

I'm running an XFX 6700 XT (Newegg page here) and while playing some games I can see some junction/hotspot temps as high as 107C. Edge temps never pass 75C. Temp monitoring software on linux is garbage and doesn't show an overall temp so I only have these two numbers to work with. I get mixed answers from different sources on google about this. Is this at all a safe temperature? During gameplay the hotspot temp hovers around 99-101C, and whenever it crosses 100c the fans usually ramp up to around 2300-2400 RPM. A potential issue is that my case isn't great. It's a Corsair Carbide Spec 02 and only has one intake in the front. I upgraded the CPU and GPU from a 1060 and a 1700 (now have a 5700x) and the cpu is also running hotter, but nothing remotely concerning. I plan on upgrading the case in the future but I want to see if this is potentially an issue with my GPU and not the case itself first. I've had the GPU for a month. No performance issues. Thanks for any input!