I’ve been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a good few years now. Unfortunately I don’t like the direction they seem to be heading.
I’ve also just ordered a new computer, so it seems like the best time to change over. While I’m sure it will start a heated debate, what variant would people recommend?
I’m not after a bleeding edge, do it all yourself OS it will be my daily driver, so don’t want to have to get elbow deep in configs every 5 minutes. My default would be to go back to Debian. However, I know the steam deck is arch based. With steam developing proton so hard, is it worth the additional learning curve to change to arch, or something else?
That valve uses Arch is irrelevant in all honesty. Proton is not a Valve product, Valve is merely one of its users and contributors, and it is not wedded to one distro…Similarly Valves own Steam packages are not distro specifi, and there are other gaming platforms to consider which also benefit from Proton (for example you can get Gog windows games working in Linux too quite easily), as well as all the Retro gaming options.
Pick a distro you personally like. I use Mint as I like the cinnamon desktop interface and the distro is pretty much good to go from fresh install. I use Mint both as a dual install with Windows on my PC and also within VMs in Windows. I still spend a lot of time using Windows because of specific games compatibility and work related apps.
EndeavourOS seems a good choice if you do want to go the Arch route but it’s only something I’ve played with in a VM.
If you want something gaming specific then Draugar seems like a good choice - it apparently uses Ubuntu LTS but with the mainline Kernel updates optimised for gaming. But I have no personal experience with the distro.
I also see a lot of people seem to like Pop!_OS, but again no personal experience.
I’ve had no issues with Mint on my setup.
Proton is most certainly a mission critical Valve product. But, yeah, use whatever. I swear by Fedora.
Exactly. Proton is Valve’s name for their WINE-based product. It’s basically WINE with some patches to work with the Valve ecosystem.
It’s also largely community driven, but that didn’t make it not a Valve product, Valve still controls what goes in and what doesn’t after all (which is why projects like Glorious Eggroll’s proton builds are so prevalent, sometimes you want to try stuff Valve hasn’t approved yet).
Proton is developed by valve, with help from the company behind wine.