2024 will be the year I finally be the year I ditch windows.
I am not exactly new to linux, yet I am far from an expert. I made my journey over the years form trying Ubuntu (many many major revisions ago) and have found myself down the rabbit hole of going Arch. I run Arch with KDE on my laptop. I want to fully ditch Windows on my desktop, however I feel this will be a much bigger hurdle to overcome.
Build Specs: i7-12700KF Copper Modded EVGA RTX 3090 64gb of 3600mhz DDR4 ASUS Tuf Z690 Wifi D4
I could go into more detail about my specs, but the specs aren’t what has made this journey a bit tougher. I use a Line 6 Helix and a Line 6 PowerCab 112+ and both have usb connections to my computer for integration with, you guessed it; windows or mac software only. Now I don’t have a problem running wine, and a number of other solutions to run windows programs, I do however have a gap in knowledge in order to try to use these specific programs with specific USB peripherals.
Now, I am not sure if this is the best way, but I had heard the idea of USB passthrough. And I have no clue where to begin with that. Would this be the direction I should be going for programs such as those?
The only other software that I am going to struggle replacing is the RGB lighting software for all of my hardware. Most of it is corsair (Fans, RAM, Water Cooler, and plugins for the asus motherboard.) And my Steeleseries keyboard which uses GG.
I have looked into using OpenRGB but I was unable to figure out how to get those setup as it wasn’t as plug and play as the manufacturer software, but understandably of course.
The absolute biggest hurdles is my Nvidia problem. I have always had issues with Nvidia on Arch. I would gladly take an suggestion. For reference, I would be using this mainly for my gaming. I occasionally dabble in Stable Diffusion.
I will be running Arch with KDE preferably, but every single time I have had issues.
I suppose any feedback anyone may have would be helpful.
Checklist of things I need to get working on in Arch, any help would be welcomed:
- Helix Guitar pedal and PowerCab 112+ (USB Passthrough or any other alternatives people may suggest)
- RGB for SteeleSeries Apex Pro (GG software on windows, open to alternatives)
- RGB for Corsair (iQue on windows, open to alternatives)
- Nvidia Drivers
I have an ASUS m/b, Corsair fans (via a Commander Pro), and Razer mouse/keyboard and all the RGB is controlled with OpenRGB. It works okay but if my computer goes to sleep the RGB settings need to be reapplied… there might be a workaround for this, it’s one of those minor problems that I will get around to one day. OpenRGB recognised all the devices without any help and it was really easy to set up.
All the best for the switch!
If I happen to find a fix, or work around for that issue mentioned I will reach out. I did have Arch running on this machine once, but I didn’t tinker with OpenRGB for my lighting at that point.
I have (finally, and thanks to this little chat) finally got around to researching this! I couldn’t find any plugins, although, there are many great ones people have made: https://openrgb.org/plugins.html But it does look like the solution is going to be running a cron (job scheduler) script: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cron
Use VirtualBox to make a Windows VM and you pick the USB devices from the menu to connect them on the fly, or you can configure the VM to pass them in by default.
The absolute biggest hurdles is my Nvidia problem. I have always had issues with Nvidia on Arch. I would gladly take an suggestion.
Ouch. Buy Radeon.
It’s okay to dual-boot, or have independent systems. Just a suggestion, to consider.
I have 3 daily driven rigs. A MacBook for work, a Linux laptop for most things personal, and a Windows PC for gaming. Everything serves a purpose and specific use case.
Funny enough, last time I tried to do the whole 2 systems, I had Arch (with GRUB) on one nvme, and windows 11 on another nvme. At some point, all drives were unbootable. I am lucky I had my important data backed up, and on a separate drive anyways.
I had thought about it, but I really want to ditch anything windows.
A man after my own heart.
I had a whole bunch of machines and I just realised I haven’t booted Windows on any of them for a couple of weeks. I daily drive Tumbleweed when I don’t need any advanced Adobe features or play games that run on Windows only.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say I will ditch Windows completely, but it is nice to have options.
RGB for Corsair (iQue on windows, open to alternatives)
What I do with my Commander is to use the onboard lighting and fan curves. Set it up on a VM or when you still have Windows.
You can also look into Liquidctl
If all you need is to control RGB, I’ve been satisfied with OpenRGB. OP is saying he’s running Arch, and OpenRGB was quite recently moved from the AUR to the extra repos. The relevant package is openrgb.
