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.
Nix is great, I went from arch to nix and never went back. All the customization, none of the risk. You break your rig you roll back to its previous state
Agree, might go back to it, but when that came up at the beggining of this year ( or was it last ? ) about mainter’s made me leave it until the situation settled down cause I didn’t wanna use a distro in an unstable maintenanve state.
Fortunately it was just the Nixos foundation that was having issues. The Nixpkg repo and nix package manager were stable
If you’re looking for a challenge you could try FreeBSD. While not Linux it’s still unix like and can provide a great learning experience. I believe they have retroarch in their packages, and I’ve seen videos of people getting Steam working. They provide excellent documentation on their OS as a whole.
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.
Current nixos user and it seems to me to have stabilized a good bit. I know that the nixos foundation held their first elections for the steering community. Also they recently released their new stable 24.11 version that seemed to go smoothly.
It is not back to where it was in terms of dev trust but there is good progress, and my software still gets updated so I have stuck with it
I went through a similar path to yours, and settled on Bazzite. If gaming is not your main thing, you might want to check out the ublue project to learn about the other spins
For a Linux distro, try Slackware or one of the immutable ones. For not a Linux distro, try one of the BSDs.
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 to 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.
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!
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!) :)
Bummer! It’s kinda neat to use, but yeah, they dropped older hardware support (though it’s still fairly young, so maybe it will be a thing in the future).
PikaOS looks cool, never heard of it, but it had me a Debian optimized hardware and software support:). What’s the hyprland version?
Not sure, but it’s supposed to be near-bleeding edge for everything. I couldn’t get the Hyprland version to boot in a VM, so I can’t be sure
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.
Chimera Linux
I’m pretty new to Linux, so not sure if this is the best option. But I’ve been playing around with the Fedora KDE spin now that it’s an official version. Really been enjoying it so far! Much prefer KDE to GNOME.
I have been using Linux for a long time (20+ years) and my main had been Arch.
Just wanted to say I put Fedora KDE spin on a laptop about 8 months ago and it has been great! Updates are frequent but have gone smoothly, some software is newer than arch which is kind of surprising.
But it’s all been integrated well and I was pleasantly surprised.
So I agree with you as a longer Linux user.
I hope the new Fedora project lead does just as good a job.
Curious, why the constant switching? You haven’t addressed what you’re specifically looking for or how many of the other distros failed to meet your needs. Or is it just for fun and to try new things (a perfectly valid reason)?
For gaming you want something with recent kernel and packages as the space is evolving rapidly. I’d say check out Silverblue or Bazzite as they seem interesting well maintained projects on a solid foundation. But I may be biased, as a happy fedora user. I’d avoid anything too niche but that’s just me.
I wrote at the end in an edit it’s for fun and learning new things.
I tend to get bored of running the ssme distro for more than a year.
Luckilly my machine isn’t a work machine and just my personal plaything which I can break whenever I wan’t and then spend time learning how to fix it ( exceot lfs. i still need to use it to manage my server’s )
Bluefin will help you learn how to use an immutable distro
Void linux might be something, if you want to try a distro that is independent from the usual distro-tree-roots.
