This is a bit of an updated post for some hardware that sort of fell into my lap that I’m trying to decide what to do with. I found a rig on the trash that has a GTX 970 and after taking off the cooler I learned it has an i7 4790 CPU. For the time it came out, this was pretty top tier hardware, but obviously today it’s dated.
So I was thinking of doing a living room emulation build with this, for games up to wii/PS2, and maybe some older PC games as well. I was originally thinking of going with batocera, but considering I would like to do retro PC gaming as well, I’m not sure this is the best option. I don’t know if bazzite would be the best option either, since that usually focuses on modern pc gaming.
So any thoughts on the best software for this rig, for the uses I’m thinking?
Depending on how open you are to be tinkering with the system I would suggest Arch since it can be very lightweight as a base and then use reteroarch for the emulation (but I’m not sure about the wii emulation…)
I am fairly new to Linux overall, so I’m not sure how confident I would be installing arch, but I guess it’s worth a go.
If it’s just installing you are conserned about ther is the option of the arch install script. Used that too for my first install and it’s basicaly just typing “archinstall” ind the tty and choosing some values for things like partitioning user settings and desktop environment.
For a newbie, I’d recommend EndeavourOS or CachyOS over vanilla Arch. Even to get to the point where archinstall works, you have to do the first few steps of installing Arch manually, and that may be a bit daunting for someone not used to the terminal.
Agreed. As someone who dd’s Arch, never suggest Arch to a true Linux newbie. It’s just a lot more involving than someone new is prepared for generally. CLI has never bothered me, but I’ve been using CLI since MS-DOS 5.
Arch is something I would wait for until someone has had a chance to dip their toes in first to see if they even care to invest their time into learning.