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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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There's an atomic Fedora spin made for gaming, Bazzite, and the experience has been to install, and just go. Everything works, everything is set up for gaming and performance monitoring, it's actually baffling how good this is!
I realise I' sounding like a shill, but genuinely it's great and seems to be what you're looking for. You can always just try it in a VM!
Bazzite seems superior for handhelds or just pure gaming setups, I game like 20% of the time maybe less these days
Ah, I do use Mint on my dev laptop but Bazzite on my gaming PC, each has their own usage.
It's really just Fedora with different defaults, pre-installed software (mostly for Steam, MangoHUD, etc.) and a welcome-screen that helps you set up different software.
If it's worth anything I daily drive Bazzite but also only game around 20% of the time. It's still a great daily driver, does all I need it to do. Let me know if I can answer any questions.
That only holds true if you choose to download the version with Steam Game Mode, which boots directly to Steam's UI, this version is called bazzite-deck. If you go with the no game mode version, it boots like a normal PC: to the desktop.
The non-game mode version is a solid choice as a daily driver. I use Bazzite on my main PC, I work by day and do gaming at night. Bazzite excels at both.
Seems annoying for tinkering, but good as a daily driver with minimal issues, i'm going bazzite if I get any issues with cachyos, reccomending bluefin/aurora to family that want to switch depending on if they like plasma or gnome, I like universal blue and how those distros work, if Linux was the only OS on this computer id go bazzite, for now I still have windows as a backup, so i'm going cachyos. I haven't opened the windows side in 2 days tho, so I might just fully make the switch.
Ill check it out, only time I heard it mentioned was someone saying cachyos is superior if you dont mind a bit of tinkering
That said, it isn't fun for firmware development.
I have daily driven it for 6 months or so. Most things work great but more niche uses like embedded firmware development, digitally signing documents (impossible on bazzite as far as I have found) and anything that requires udev rules or interplay between software.
Otherwise it is great! Much better day to day than opensuse Kalpa.
Fedora. It just works. I use it for work and it doesn't let me down. Semi annual upgrading it is easy and it seems to be moving slowly, because gnome/LibreOffice is, to flatpaks. It's slow to change and stable because of it, they still include Grub when it became a relic since systemd included gummyboot (systemd-boot) many years ago.
Contrast that with ArchLinux which is 'cleaner' and a rolling distro which I prefer; Fedora isn't. I use it for a Rescue USB. I used to use it for work but, and this is long ago, I managed to break it quite easily by 'fixing it' too much! ArchLinux doesn't let me down but I don't have a gui or Window manager on it, console only, and I know my way around Linux reasonably well.
Debian is still confused about systemd. Run a combination of testing and unstable branches on the desktop and you've got a great system but this is before the systemd days where they moved all the systemd defaults to the old/odd places that make no sense. As you say, snap appears to be another mad experiment by Ubuntu, like mir when everyone went to wayland.
If you're going to use your PC for games, I think there may be better distros than these. I'm not a gamer so I can't advise.
I'm not a huge fan of derivative distros, like Ubuntu (based on Debian decreasingly) or so on. I'm not one to mess about with screen savers etc and aesthetics though. To me derivatives add bloat and unexpected changes.
Source distros are a rabbit hole I've been down. They were fun but I couldn't get myself to do any work when I had them.
I've never tried SUSE, it's alternative rpm style distro which can be stable as a rolling.
Distrowatch.com is always worth a visit. Find a/several forum that is your intended use and find out which district they use there; if you have issues they'll know how to fix it.
2nd Fedora. I used Mint, Pop!_OS, Open SUSE tumbleweed, Nobara, EndeavourOS, MX Linux, Manjaro (eww) and Fedora finally clicked as my primary distribution. It’s not without its occasional hiccups. A while back, waking my machine from suspend stopped working. It took a month but they fixed it with an update, I didn’t bother with any work arounds because I knew they would.
Gaming and multimedia experience has been great. Between the RPM Fusion repos, COPR, and flatboat, I can always find the software I need. It’s solid, fresher than anything Ubuntu based, and rarely has issues.
Nobara looks interesting for fedora, do you have experience with it? Or anyone else seeing this comment. Nvm its developed by one dude
Not just any dude. That's Glorious Eggroll! As in GE from GE-Proton.
Debian laptop user here, left Windows on my gaming desktop for a decent while. Now that I'm more accustomed to Linux DE's I installed Nobara on it about a month ago. Zero issues with the NVIDIA variant on my 3080 so far
I think I heard fedora will never be supported by a ps3 emulator because of some core issues and that turned me away initially, some youtuber was swapping away from it, though now im not sure and it may have been some other distro, cant find info online
I see people saying CachyOS is finicky, but I've had almost no issues in two years of extensive use.
And anything that pops up gets fixed extremely quickly.
What’s better, everything you need for gaming is in the repos by default and pre-tweaked, no need to fuss with it like other distros. This is my nitpick with Fedora or Arch AUR: once you go outside the curated, officially supported packages, you are asking for trouble.
The only issue I've had is that the system will completly freeze up, although it only happens every once in a great while. I never had it happen on any other Arch based distro.
Actually I had this one!
Something about their swap config makes it very fragile unless you use RAM swap as enabled by default, and I kept having this when I disabled it for reasons. It was much better once I re enabled it, though occasionally I still have severe issues going way, way, over my RAM pool.
I don’t mention that much because swapping to like 64GB on a 32GB system seems like an uncommon use case.
I haven't touched anything related to swap or memory managment. They said they don't ship with a swap partition or file. I figured the devs must know best.
Yeah, it uses only ram swap by default. If you aren’t going over a ton, it shouldn’t matter.
I just have weird workloads that spike memory usage a ton for short times, so I have to go out to my nvme.
Yeah, thats why picking a gaming focused one seems like a good idea, theres a community thatll fix stuff before I need to think of it
Exactly, and you can get mesa git and some other “fix” packages natively with community integration if you find you need them, without veering off track all by yourself.
PopOS is in a rough state. The stable ISO is using absurdly an absurdly outdated desktop, and the beta using COSMIC desktop. I personally love COSMIC, but it is far from stable, so I would not recommend it to most users.
CachyOS is a great distro. The performance gains from its changes won't be huge, but the people acting like its nonexistent are silly. They also make many upcoming performance improving features like NTSYNC available early in their default kernel.
I definitely wouldn't go Debian or Mint for gaming personally. I don't like stable distros with such slow release schedules for gaming, mainly because of stuff like the prior mentioned NTSYNC. You don't get those new features for a long time.
I saw people recommending Bazzite, which is a distros I highly recommend. The only issue I have with Bazzite is that installing kernel modules they don't ship is pretty much unsupported and requires a lot of jumping through hoops. Most people won't need this, but it matters from some use cases like if you need steering wheel drivers.
Have you tried EndeavorOS, any thoughts?
Yep, that was actually my second distros when I switched to Linux a few years ago (right after PopOS). Its a good distro, essentially Arch with a better out of the box setup. If were to go with an arch based distro today, I'd probably choose CachyOS for the package and kernel optimizations, but both are good.
Arch-based distros are definitely CLI centric, but if you don't mind that then its great! Just keep in mind it is a rolling distro, breakages aren't super common, but they can occur. A backup using Timeshift is probably a good idea. Also, I wouldn't rely too heavily on the AUR, remember they are unofficial packages and are more prone to breakage. Id prefer flatpak for GUI apps at least.
You want stable and no snaps.
Debian
I keep seeing people recommending Debian. Its a great OS, especially for server stuff (which I use in multiple VMs in my home lab), but I wouldn't recommend it on a computer you're actively using. They take so long to update packages you're always multiple versions behind. This really makes it difficult to get bug fixes and patches for software that you're using on a daily basis. The hardware support is never as good as other options.
Have you looked at tumbleweed? Its a rolling release so its always up to date but opensuse's testing is fantastic. It's very stable and on the off chance there's a regression that impacts usability, it has built in version snapshots. It takes literally 45 seconds to roll back to a previous working version.
Honestly you should be getting similar performance and package quality on all modern up to date distros. Pick whatever looks good to you.
If you want CachyOS I highly recommend you to have atleast Haswell or Alteast Ryzen If you use AMD due to their Compiled packages and stuff.
Endeavor os If you don't have atleast haswell/Ryzen.
Stock Arch If your fine building it.
Debian I wouldn't recommend to use for a pc you use often.
Popos I never used it before but it seems like a "stable gaming" Distro.
Mint is also a great option I use it on pcs I sometimes use and it's also easy to use.
I have ryzen
I'm quite happy with CachyOS but use whatever makes you happy. Just pick something with a desktop envionment you like (KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, GNOME)
I had been rocking CachyOS for a year or so but the recent Nvidia drivers or something caused me a shit load on instability so I'm back on windows for now. Got tired of tinkering. 😅
I use cachyos for gaming and work. It's amazing. Stable, fast, drivers all work with no extra setup. Just select Ext4 during installation if you want the fastest hard drive performance.
Try NixOS. The killer feature is mixing old and new packages because deps are not globally installed