Hello, I have been a linux user for close to 6 years now and I have changed my distro quite a bit ( especially in first few months of starting out linux ).
I have wen’t from ubuntu, xubuntu, fedora, peppermint, arch, artix, … in first few years. After that I have settled on arch for close to 2 years. After that long time on arch I decided to try out and test interesting distro’s for at minimum 6 months every year ( and if I didn’t like them I would go to arch back ) until I found something else I could main because I have found a few issues with arch that I could accept but would become annoying from time to time.
Across the two year’s I started this yourney I have used gentoo ( used it for a year but then the lack of a proper retroarch package made me change the distro, plus the 3+ hours compile times when updating specific software ( looking at you qt-webengine and firefox ) ), then I choose to try out nixos which I used for 3/4 months before all that main maintainer debacle and splitting of the team I wen’t back to arch because I didn’t wan’t a distro I’m using falling appart on me.
And here I am now, another year is soon to start and I’m searching for another different type of a distro to try out that does something differently compared to most distros, even willing to try out nixos again if the situation has stabilized now.
My only hard requirement is that the distro need’s to be able to play games ( as in steam and gog ).
Edit: just to clarify, I’m chaning distro’s on a yearly basis for a learning experience and fun.
Void linux might be something, if you want to try a distro that is independent from the usual distro-tree-roots.
I’d suggest OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and one of the UBlue images - maybe Bazzite, since you mentioned gaming. But Steam and GOG run on all of those.
Try Bedrock Linux and tell us all about it.
Try PikaOS.
It’s Debian for gaming. They use the CachyOS kernel (rebranded), BTRFS, the Debian Sid base, and they do the package optimization thing that Cachy does. They also use a lot of the same UI tooling from Nobara, like the welcome screen and icons, and the update GUI is based on but an improvement over the one from Nobara. There’s also the same Kernel Manager and Scheduler selector as what you’d find in Cachy.
Like Arch, it’s a rolling update distro, and they have some kind of automated process that builds/optimizes new packages every day.
It’s admirable what they’re trying to do, and I’m currently considering making a bare-metal switch.
Sadly, it’s for Haswell and higher, I’m on an older Sandy Lake CPU so could not get it to boot and then I saw in their Wiki about the requirements. Yeah, it’s an old PC. (~14 yrs old and as temperamental as a teenager!) :)
PikaOS looks cool, never heard of it, but it had me a Debian optimized hardware and software support:). What’s the hyprland version?
Bodhi Linux or ElementaryOS
Nyarch Linux
The perfect linux distribution for degenerated weebs.
It’s based on Arch, therefore has my approval. I don’t use it, just saw it in some Linux related comment mentioned recently (today in fact).
I personally use EndeavourOS - https://endeavouros.com/ , which is based on Arch and operates close to Archlinux, but has some automated stuff going on that helps people like me. Its so close to Arch, that I ask myself why I’m not switching to it entirely. Simple answer is: Don’t touch a running system.
Nyarch honestly looks like a joke distro and most of its features are not worth IMO.
Here’s a cool idea: uBlue and specifically Bazzite. And should it not be entirely to your liking, you can always build a custom ublue image!
Puppy is pretty neat.
If you’re looking for a new daily driver, look at Fedora Silverblue. I also started on arch, and have been in nix for the last two years, and I’m planning to switch to Silverblue in the next year
Gentoo has binary packages now, you might want to try it again. There are retroarch packages in the overlays. Otherwise, interesting distros I know of that you haven’t listed yet are
- Void
- Guix System
- Gobo Linux (unfortunately very low on maintainers so probably not usable as a daily driver, but it is to me the most interesting of these)
That defeats the whole purpose of using gentoo tho.
you’ve mentioned this twice in the comments & now i’m curious! do you kind elaborating a bit more? i’m still getting a handle on all the diff distros & functionalities.
Gentoo is a distro that you compile all the packages ( atleast used to be that ) where you compile packages with flags that optimize those for your exact cpu.
Also allows you to strip out features from packages while compiling like X11/wayland uf you don’t use either.
This can help a lot in general performance of your system.
You can use binary packages for x86_64-v3 and it will already use a lot more modern CPU instructions, and it will still compile single packages from source if you change the USE flags to something the binhost doesn’t have.
It certainly doesn’t “defeat the whole purpose of using Gentoo”.
I used tl strip out more than half the features those packages provided that I didn’t need, so it does for my usecases.
What percentage of packages?
100%, I use to do global use flags at ‘-*’ and then set minimal amount of flags till I get something working.
Spent a whole day doing that.
Try YiffOS
looking at you qt-webengine and firefox
You do know gentoo has binary versions of the bigger packages, like LibreOffice and browsers like Firefox, right? Right?
Try Slackware.
That defeats the purpose of using gentoo tho.
True… i compile mine as well.
Void is one I’ve often thought I’d like to try if I had time to dig into it.
Hey, I used Void and had a great time with it, I loved the speed of xbps and acter I got used to it, the minimal nature of runit felt lile a breath of fresh air (which feels weird in retrospect, as I’ve never had any issues with systemd). The only problem I had (other than getting used to xbps and runit) was pipewire. As I was using a tiling WM, I couldn’t figure out what was happening and why, but I was having serious issues with pipewire and wireplumber not working, until through trial and error I finally managed to fix it but by then I was already set on moving to Fedora (again). That was in April btw.
TLDR: I’d recommend it. XBPS and Runit are new (and pretty good) and take a bit to get used to, but the thing that drove me away was pipewire issues.
Does runit have the equivalent of
systemctl --userfor managing per-user daemons like pipewire? I had some issues with pipewire recently and being able tojournalctl --user -u pipewireandsystemctl --user restart pipewirewas a total godsend for me.
I don’t know if it is available yet, but KDE Linux sounds pretty cool. It’s kinda the same “Arch for everyone” take on Arch that Valve has going on with SteamOS, but with some pretty fancy stuff planned.
If you want to learn about a couple of cool customisations, you could also take a look at Garuda Linux, specifically the Dragonized Gaming Edition (aka Bloaty McBloatface Edition) or XeroLinux (although I don’t know if that’s maintained atm, I think the dev had to flew from a war in the middle east)
MX Linux, it’s Debian based but always updated with latest packages day to day. With Xfce, it just works, no fancy DE, no snap, no flatpak, just good old .deb
