Hey everyone! I’m finally fed up with Win11 and the bullshit that comes with it for the PC it’s on.
It’s being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich, and gaming PC for the living room.
I’m currently in the process of backing up all my important info and am doing research on which distro to use.
I don’t mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key. I don’t want to have to go in and update it every week… I want this one to work with minimal maintenance on my part.
I’d likely update it a few times a year, knowing me.
A few hardware specs:
MSI mobo (I’ve learned that UEFI can be a pain), 10600k, 2070 gpu, and will have a pool of 3x8tb drives that I would like to have in raid5 (or something similar) for storage (movies, TV shows, and Immich libraries), the OS will have its own drive, and I have a separate SSD that I have been using to store programs, games, yml’s for docker, and other such things that get accessed more frequently, but aren’t crucial if lost.
I’ve kinda narrowed it down to either Bazzite or CachyOS.
I’ve heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down, which I’m not a fan of, but CachyOS has features I will likely never touch (schedulers, kernels, etc…).
I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS. I’m moving away from windows for that reason. Win11 has been a nightmare for me with constant reboots and things not loading up until after I log in. Not to mention driver conflicts and all the other BS that’s come with it.
So… What say the hive mind? Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work? Or do I have it all wrong with my perception of both?
Thanks!
Ps: this will be my first full commit to Linux. I’ve dabbled in the past and am no stranger to CLI… So this will likely be a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux. Go easy on me lol
I have neither used Bazzite nor CachyOS. You’re sure you don’t want to try Linux Mint? It’s extremely stable Linux for your grandma. Seriously, my dad’s laptops run Mint, and have for the last 5-6 years. When he gets a new laptop, I go over and install Mint for him (and he doesn’t know what Linux even means, he keeps calling LibreOffice “linux”). He asks me for help with his Windows desktop all the time (which he needs for certain software), but linux “just works” (his words). My son’s gaming computer and our house TV (which is an oldish Dell All-In-One that both my son and my wife need to be able to use) also run Mint.
For me, work computers that need to be stable run Mint, work computers that need to be secure run Qubes and servers run Debian.
I second this; Mint is great if you want to set up once and get going.
seconding this, my gf struggles with tech, i put her laptop on linux mint and shes had a much easier time using it
My 70 + year old mother uses pop OS and has a degoogled phone that she uses signal to measage. Switching cost is a lie… the tech bros always switching things up so much anyways… Whats is stable and reliable anyways. This world is a shit storm of corpo tech bro nonsense. meh
Linux mint is pretty chill! Debian I think? Its got all the bells and whistles. When I set it up for the first time it kinda reminded me of windows. I also like redshift which does not work on pop OS which I use now as a daily driver.
No, Mint is Ubuntu.
LMDE is Debian.
Ubuntu is also Debian under the hood.
Yes, but it’s more up-to-date and Ubuntu has Canonical tentacles all over it.
Most (all?) of the bad Canonical stuff is removed in Linux Mint. It’s the reason for its existence.
You do get the good stuff though like Ubuntu’s better hardware support and PPAs etc that Debian doesn’t have.
I know.
I was just replying that Ubuntu and Debian are different.
That last bit is why I run LMDE. Ubuntu was great for a while (started using it 2010-ish), but I don’t like the direction Canonical is going these days.
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Have you found an alternative way to use your house TV with anything other than mouse and keyboard? (Like a remote or something?)
There are remotes for PC. I have one right now, and they are pretty cheap in Amazon. One nice thing is that they can also do limited control of the TV (through IR, obv).
One thing to keep in mind is that most identity not all of these remotes have a gyro mouse.
I haven’t tried.
I don’t mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key
I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS
Yeah I wouldn’t recommend a rolling release distro like cachy then lol. Debian or it’s derivatives would be better for something low maintenance that you don’t need to update frequently
I also wouldn’t recommend bazzite, just cause im not a fan of immutable distros as they feel too locked down for me, but I’ve never attempted to set up a jellyfin on one, so someone else with more experience would provide a more concrete answer for your purposes there
Yea, I want something stable and an arch based distro don’t really go together.
One of the Debian family is best for that.
Arch based distros can be very stable these days.
People forget that SteamOS on the Steam Deck is Arch based.
what’s the point of using arch if you won’t be going any heavy tinkering or using bleeding edge shit? debian is the objectively correct choice here
If they’re going to be using docker and gaming, they probably do want to be tinkering though while so having stability.
Hence, Arch. That’s why Valve went with it too.
If they won’t be doing gaming stuff though, then yeah Debian is the better choice.
Arch can be very stable, and if you pin linux you shouldn’t have to reboot very often… but it’s still a rolling release, and þe longer you go between updates þe greater þe chances you’ll encounter an issue.
Twice a year, þough… I have pure Arch machines I update þat infrequently. Dealing wiþ
.pacnewfiles is always a major endeavor, and archnews can be a slog, but while I wouldn’t advocate updating once a year, twice? Doable. Quarterly? Absolutely. Every oþer monþ? Þat’s about how frequently I upgrade my desktop, usually because I want a new version of someþing and þe dependency cascade makes an-Syueasier.Life got a lot better when I pinned my kernel, þough. Þe reboots were þe most annoying part.
Bazzite is good for gaming and general computing. If you want to run servers or tinker with the OS at all it becomes annoying and impractical.
Fedora is stable, with modern packages, and is what Bazzite is based off of. I’d probably recommend that.
Debian is rock-solid stable, but lacks newer packages. It’s great for a server, not so great for gaming and general computing.
Debian is rock-solid stable, but lacks newer packages. It’s great for a server, not so great for […] general computing.
What the fuck??? I’ve been daily driving Debian for years now on my personal laptops, desktop, mini PC, and mutliple servers. I’ve found and reported Linux kernel vulnerabilities on my trusty Debian systems.
What do you mean it’s not so great for general computing? What can’t you do with Debian computing-wise that you can do with other distros? The only issues I’ve ever had was with some LaTeX packages being older versions. You just get that from CTAN and install that manually.
This is such a ridiculous comment. What do you do on a server that’s not general computing? You’re doing a subset of general computing??? How does a fucking distro actively prevent you from doing general computing???
Packages are frequently outdated. Older packages can be difficult for new users who want a computer to “just work”. It’s fine for general computing, but not great.
Also fuck off with this attitude man. I’m not attacking you, learn how to speak to people.
Also fuck off with this attitude man. I’m not attacking you, learn how to speak to people.
Sorry. I get quite triggered when people add pseudo-labels to distributions, mainly Debian being outdated. Looking back, I was quite harsh and I apologize.
However, you’re actively spreading the false narrative by saying Debian’s not good for “general computing” - this is what triggers me. A distribution is nothing but its package manager and some defaults. Some have different defaults and package managers.
Older packages can be difficult for new users who want a computer to “just work”.
The only place this makes a difference is with the latest hardware which OP does not have. I have more recent hardware than OP and Debian 13 + KDE Plasma 6 works out of the box.
It’s fine for general computing, but not great.
Again, I really hate this sentence. I will tone down the rudeness this time in explaining why. I have daily-driven Debian for years with AMD + Intel CPUs, Nvidia GPUs (1070, 3060) with use cases ranging wildly through the years. I cannot fathom what kind of general computing cannot work. If you say specialized computing, I would still disagree as there are always ways to make things work.
Just off the top of my head where things are iffy with Debian: bat cannot be installed via a package manager, but not on most distros anyway. There’s a deb package though which works. Similar with dust, although more distros have it in their package manager.
Debian, like you said, is rock-solid stable. In my many years of developing code, university courses, daily work (research), maintaining servers with wildly different usages, Debian’s “outdated” packages have only let me down once and that was with a LaTeX package which could be installed via ctan anyway.
Okay, aside from all the distro advice, I have some practical install advice.
There’s a program called Ventoy. At ventoy.net
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and Ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them
Most distros these days have a live CD option, meaning you can run the distro and test how it feels without actually committing to an install.
So, take all the distro options here and throw them all on a thumb drive with ventoy installed, then you can simply boot into each one.
Now, my personal fav distro is called Garuda. It excells at gaming, and can do everything you want, but will put a red blinking icon in the task bar if you don’t update every week or so.
Garuda is Arch based.
Ventoy is great. I have a dedicated 128GB flash drive with a variety of ISOs, including various live and full-install Linux distros, Windows (LTSC only + MAS scripts), and diagnostics (Hirens, memtest86, etc).
Incredibly handy to have on-hand.
Good advise, but 0/10; you forgot your ‘btw’ after mentioning arch :p
Eh, Garuda has its own repositories and packages, so it’s Arch, but not Arch Arch if that makes sense.
I know what ya meant, just pulling your leg.
Its like how i use linux mint. Its ubuntu, technically, but has its own repos
I don’t believe Ventoy is safe. Too much dodgy stuff.
https://feddit.online/post/605807#post_replies
Isn’t it a hacky one person foss project? of course the thing is gonna be dodgy, I’m neither shocked nor worried about it.
Debian. It’s rock solid. You don’t need anything flashy or new fangled if you’re just building a home server.
I wouldn’t suggest bazzite or cachyos for a newbie.
Between those two I would recommend Bazzite, but I think I would actually recommend Bazzite’s parent distro, Fedora, instead. Mainly just because I don’t know how Bazzite would handle server software.
Also to note, updating Linux is significantly quicker and less painful than updating Windows
The issue with Fedora for OP is its update frequency might annoy them. Bazzite doing automatic updates might feel more “set it and forget it” for them.
I also would expect server software to be fine on bazzite, just run it in docker containers (which you should be doing for hosting services anyway)
No joke. It feels like I’m constantly catching up with Fedora. And I am a person who finds system upgrades recreational. It is not a good pick for OP.
I’ve been running Fedora on one of my computers fore years. It’s pretty good and stable, but there are lots of updates. I haven’t really bothered to tweak or update that much, which seems to be a bad combination for Fedora. I think this distro requires more maintenance than I’m willing to give it.
For example, updates used to work for a while, until one day they just didn’t any more. I fixed that, and things were ok for a little while, until another update broke the GUI again. Eventually, I just got tired of troubleshooting a basic thing like the update GUI, and stopped fixing it every year. I just ignored the GUI, and installed updates through the terminal instead. I just can’t be bothered to fix the GUI more often than maybe once every 5 years.
Eventually, I realized I don’t have the time or energy to do that much admin work for a computer that doesn’t matter that much. Had it been my primary computer, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but in this case it was. Recently, I switched to Debian. Let’s see how well that system handles the level of neglect I’ll be subjecting it to.
Besides, that computer doesn’t even require the latest versions, so why bother with Fedora. Debian should be new enough for my needs, and installing updates like few times a year should be fine.
There’s a lot of well meaning but not too well informed advice in here. Since one of your goals is gaming, stay away from Mint. It can be made to work (well), but you have to get there. It’s basically the recommendation people gave for decades, but there have been massive improvements through many distros while mint just kinda stood still. There’s still some things they do rather well though.
CachyOS will do what you want it to, and it is what I switched to like 8 months ago. It isn’t maintenance heavy at all if you don’t want it to be. I think I had to intervene once since I started using it, but that intervention was necessary or it wouldn’t have booted after updates. The official updater will tell you when that’s the case, as it lists critical news like that. Otherwise it just works, and it’s pre-configured and optimized for gaming. Under the hood it’s basically Arch, just without the fiddling of getting it to a usable state. Because of that they’re is also an enormous amount of information out there (Arch wiki) on how to do stuff.
Bazzite is a stark contrast in many ways as it’s an immutable distro, but also pre-configured and optimized (maybe not quite as much as CachyOS). It will also do what you want just fine. It is relatively “safe” due to the immutability, and updates are much rarer (and by definition always whole system updates). I don’t know exactly how you’d run your services, but assuming they are dockerized or similar that should be just fine, but please do some searching before if it does contain what you need in the base image (presumably docker and docker compose).
Since one of your goals is gaming, stay away from Mint. It can be made to work (well), but you have to get there.
Mint works just fine for gaming. I run LMDE 6, all you really have to do is install Steam with Proton. I also run RPCS3 without any odd configuration outside of game-specific items (which you would have to do on Windows as well so it’s a moot point).
My experience as well. So far I’ve run ~20 games through steam and never even needed protondb advice as it just worked.
I play multiple Windows-only games on Steam, including BeamNG.Drive, which hilariously runs even better on Linux than it ever did on Windows. It maintains 60+ FPS on High settings at 1440P without even trying.
I was running everything through Docker, so that will be a must. Jellyfin was on its own executable, but that was because something with transcoding, I think, wasn’t working with docker. I don’t remember now what the problem was, but apparently the issue didn’t exist in the Linux docker version. It was isolated to windows.
If it’s not in the base image, there will be a way to add it, yea?
Somewhere else in the thread someone mentioned Bazzite not being ideal for servers, but I’m still parsing through all the replies, so I’m unsure how accurate that is.
Docker and Bazzite are not plug-and-play. That being said, bazzite comes with podman, and podman can create a docker environment.
But…I am not an expert here by any means. Do not take this as a green light to just go ahead and pick bazzite. Bazzite is my daily driver and I use podman to run arch and Ubuntu CLI programs as well as an ollama local llm server, but I know NOTHING about docker, I just have seen the docs and thought I would share.
These Linux Docker images may be of use to you for setup.
On Linux, running Jellyfin through docker with GPU acceleration works fine, yes. But you need some options/flags to pass access to the GPU to the inside of the container. Guides and/or docker tutorials exist and should contain that, as that’s basically the default setup these days.
As for Bazzite and Docker (I just checked), no it isn’t part of the base image and you can’t easily install it. That’s the downside of an immutable distro. I think podman is available, which is compatible and FOSS, but there may be caveats to using that. There is a bazzite version called bazzite-dx intended for developers, so that one would probably work fine for you out of the box. There shouldn’t be any real downside to using that compared to the mainline image, apart from being slightly larger cause all dev tools are installed, but do check that. My practical experience with Bazzite is limited.
My real recommendation is: just try it. Slap in a small/cheap SSD (~20 bucks) instead of whatever you got in there now, install CachyOS and try it out. Then install Bazzite and try it out. By “Try it out” I do mean setting up a copy of or a test-install of your required services (arr stack, jellyfin, …), to see if everything is as you’d expect. Possibly install more distros to try them out, then make up your mind and actually fully migrate, or if it doesn’t work out go back to your currently installed drive. Installing a linux distro takes like 10 minutes these days, then play around with however long you need. Since you already have it narrowed down to only 2 options anyway, that is most likely the best solution.
I switched to Bazzite last week, and also run Jellyfin. It’s been a pain. Hours of troubleshooting. I’m still having an issue with metadata, but I think that’s actually just Jellyfin. That said, most of the issues were easy to fix, just hard to research. SELinux is a pain and messes up Jellyfin.
Sudo Setenforce 0
And it works like a charm. Doing volume labeling does not work. Other than that, you just need to adjust to using podman instead of docker.
Oh, and gaming just works. STALKER 2 runs better on Bazzite for me than it did on Win10.
I cannot recommend Bazzite enough. It is amazing, and it’s based on Fedora, which is also amazing. I’ve used Arch based distros before, and they can be really cool, but they break once in a while, especially if you haven’t updated them in ages.
I’ve turned on a PC with Fedora after a year and a half, and just updated as usual, and it all worked. Bazzite is even easier, because updating simply means downloading a new base image and updating your Flatpaks. Easy peasy, and very quick.
To get Docker, to run your servers, in Bazzite, you can use
ujust:https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/ujust/
Or switch your base image to Bazzite DX:
my first full commit to Linux
a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux.
Linux Mint is a pretty good stepping stone into the world of Linux. Or Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), for Ubuntu/Canonical free experience. Especially if you prefer low maintenance distribution. Debian has pretty long release cycles, and LMDE, being based on it, will share similar release cycles.
If you game, Bazzite with KDE is damn near perfect. I’ve been running it for a year and never had a problem making it do what I want it to do.
I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS.
Bazzite is immutable, updates are easy and not bothersome, and if for any reason one ever breaks something, a single command (sudo rpm-ostree rollback), you go back to the previous state, easy peasy.
My setup is a lot like yours using the same apps. And I actually use Bazzite for my gaming PC.
But I would NOT recommend it for use as a server. It’s a cool distro and gets the job done for gaming. But not suitable for server needs. Also for another reason, Bazzite is immutable which means that it’s not really built to be customizable like other distros. That’s great for ensuring you don’t mess stuff up too bad, but not great for learning and for homelab stuff. You’ll want more customization and the ability to make the OS yours as you find yourself needing to make all kinds of changes as you find new stuff to deploy to it.
Like the other person said here, go with something like Debian. That’s what I am using for my server with the same apps you use.
As a beginner, you’ll find a lot of the guides online for setting up and troubleshooting will often favor Debian and it’ll be easier to do.
Bazzite doesn’t have the same convenience which you will love to have as a beginner learning the Linux space.
If you want to try out some distros, my recommendation is to get yourself a laptop that’s from within the last 5-7 years and you can load up all the different distros on there to get them a test. It’s how I do mine. I got a laptop from work they were going to e-waste and been using it exclusively for Linux for the past 2 years and tried tons of distros on it since.
A lot of people running homelabs choose Debian because it’s like you said. Easy on updates and not prone to shutting down or needing a lot of maintenance and troubleshooting. It just works.
Also, you’ll find that nearly any Linux distro nowadays doesn’t require reboots after updates. I still do them on occasion, but it’s really not necessary and the OS won’t nag you or reboot on its own. I had that frustration with Windows tons of times. Left the house and went to the gym to discover my Windows server rebooted itself that day with zero warning and now I can’t enjoy Plex or my streaming music. That happened to me a couple of times. I have never had that happen with Linux since switching. Only did when we had a power outage, but now I have a UPS and set the computer to auto start when it detects power so that won’t be an issue anymore even after an outage.
Also, if you’re not already doing it, consider using a container like Docker or Podman for your hosted apps. It’s working wonders for me and everything is much easier to control here. It’s also just a great learning experience overall. Management of your apps becomes a lot easier and keeping things contained. My only regret is that I wish I would have started using Docker when I switched to Linux, but the switch after wasn’t too bad. I just had some cleanup to do of the standalone services in transferring to Docker.
I’ve seen Debian mentioned a couple times now. Is there an ideal fork/repo/tell-me-what-word-to-use-here for what I’m trying to do?
I do have a laptop that would likely work for testing… But other than just firing it up… I have no idea what I should be doing to test it out. Install steam? Docker + a container? I don’t really have the time to commit to doing all of that for multiple distros…
All the containers will be dockerized. I’ll have to learn the new file structure and change the compose yaml’s before I fire them all up, but I can’t imagine that’ll be too horrible.
I actually really enjoyed learning docker, but it was a huge time sink and I’m trying to mitigate that as much as I can with this migration
No forks for Debian. Actually Debian is often used as a fork so Debian is the original, in a sense. A lot of other distros like Ubuntu have built themselves on Debian over the years. That somewhat speaks volumes to its longevity in the space and how stable it is.
The download I used is the one on their main page https://www.debian.org/ when you find the Download link in the center of the page. But if you’d like to see all of their options, you should take a look at this page https://www.debian.org/distrib/ but really it’s kind of the generic download for most, unless you need the ARM version because you’re installing on something like a Raspberry Pi or if you are using Azure, then they have a build for a virtual machine in the cloud.
Once you download the ISO from them, whether it be from a mirror or a torrent, you’ll use something like Rufus to create your live USB and that’ll let you try it out and then actually do the install. When in this live USB, you can do anything you want in it to test it and see how you like it. You can even install apps and such but just know that on next reboot, the live USB goes back to default, so it’s kind of like a computer that you can keep using indefinitely as a fresh install. It’s meant to do that so you can test it and ensure it’s what you want and works well with your system, because if that doesn’t load, then you won’t be able to install it at all. You basically get to run the entire OS off a USB flash drive and then there’s an option to actually install the OS to your computer if you feel ready to do so. Most distros go this route which is honestly a really great feature of Linux. That live USB is also good to hold onto in case anything should happen. For one, you have something that will let you run Linux off a USB in case you have like a hard drive failure and need to troubleshoot or if you ever need to reinstall Linux, you’ll have that ready to go again for you. The installation process for most distros nowadays is super simple and walks you through the entire process. It’s as easy as installing windows, and in my opinion, it’s easier and faster than installing Windows for most distros. Another good thing about Debian here is that it’s really basic and barebones. Bazzite will give you a bunch of programs right off the bat, but Debian is a pretty clean slate you’ll be working with so you don’t have a bunch of programs installed and possibly running that you’ll never use but not sure if you can remove them or not.
As far as installing stuff, you can generally do just like Windows and go to your choice program’s webpages and most will either have .deb files you can manually download and run to install your application (like Steam) or you can use the terminal’s apt (what Debian uses, other distros like Arch and Fedora may use something different) to search for and install packages too.
Personally I prefer using apt in the terminal to install my apps. It makes it much more clean and easy to manage for updates. So for searching you’ll want to use “apt search Steam” for Steam, for example. And you’ll get a list of results in the terminal results to choose from. When you find the one you feel is the one you want to use, you’ll then run “sudo apt install Steam” and if it finds duplicates it’ll prompt you which be you want or it’ll just ask you if you want to proceed or not and you enter a y or n for yes or no and the terminal takes care of the installation for you.
I generally find the app I want from the list of apt search and then copy the name exactly as shown in the list and paste when doing “sudo apt install Steam” where Steam is whatever was shown in the search results.
Sudo being the equivalent of entering your administrator credentials to do an elevated task like on Windows. Sudo isn’t needed when searching for an app name, hence why you don’t need sudo there, but sudo is required to actually install the app and its updates. You can use sudo with apt search, but it’s not necessary and might be a security risk to get used to using sudo when not necessary. So best to only use sudo when you know you need to. If an action requires it, either the app will directly tell you to run sudo or will tell you that access has been denied and that’s your tell tale sign that you need to use sudo before the command and run again.
When you want to update, you’ll run “sudo apt update” and the checks to see if you have updates available. If updates are available, it’ll generally say something like “5 updates found, run apt upgrade to perform upgrades” and you’ll then run “sudo apt upgrade” to actually perform the upgrades. This is pretty automated and it runs through everything for you after you do these. So any apps you have installed using apt will get their updates through this. Because of this, I generally will run through this once a week and see what needs updating. “Sudo apt update” and then “sudo apt upgrade”. Rarely will you run into errors but when you do, you’ll usually have clear wording in the terminal to tell you exactly why it failed or something you can put in Google to diagnose or share with a space like here to get help from others. Others may frown on me for saying this, but I’ve gotten a lot of help from LLMs with this stuff too. Granted you have to know some of it beforehand to know when the LLM is giving you good, helpful information and not something incorrect, but it’s been a help for me, personally, when troubleshooting arises.
If you make a mistake and install the wrong app or change your mind and no longer want it, uninstallation is as easy as “sudo apt remove steam” and following the prompts thereafter.
Some may recommend you do stuff like “sudo apt install steam -y” where the -y flag is to tell the command “if prompted for y or n, enter y” so you really automate the process for yourself. But I honestly don’t recommend that for people new to Linux because it’s better to know what you’re doing and read the prompts in the terminal and when you feel confident, then try some of those flags like that. It is one of the bad things about LLMs, because a lot of them will give you commands like that to run and it’s honestly better to not use flags until you’re sure of what you’re doing and what you want.
Honestly, if you’re familiar with docker containers and yaml files, it’s pretty much the same on Linux.
I manage my docker directly from the terminal. You’ll want to first install docker using “apt search docker” and then using commands to build my yaml and then compose within docker. But you can also use a variety of programs available to manage docker in a GUI, which is an app that has a graphical interface much like what most apps on Windows do if you’re more comfortable going that route.
Since you’ve already been using it and got some yamls made, you might be able to just directly transfer them over into your Linux build, whichever distro you end up going with and once you get docker installed and set up.
Debian ships official live images with desktop environments (KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, GNOME and MATE).
https://www.debian.org/CD/live/
You could try each and see which one you like.
There is also LMDE, Linux Mint Debian Edition. It’s not bad.
Can highly recommend Bazzite. You can install most applications and terminal programs no problem through flatpak/brew and config any well behaved package through settings files in your home directory anyways. If you really need specific system level packages, then it’s quite straightforward tinkering to setup a GitHub repo that builds a daily image for you based on Bazzite. If you break something, you just roll back to a previous build.
And for testing out new “live” packages: you can! Just make sure you don’t forget to persist them into your custom image if it turns out to be a useful addition.
I think I added just a handful packages on top of Bluefin (the non-gaming version) and it runs rather merrily.
Immutable sounds locked down, but to me it’s more like highly reproducible tinkering. Just keep your home dir clean ✨
Try something conventional, with low maintenance and large adoption, and tailored for the home user, like as Linux Mint for instance.
Take your time there to learn the basics and get acquainted with the new environment.Cachy is nice, and flashy and cool, but is a rolling release, sometimes it gets broken by some package update (…systemd), and it might need some tweaking to get a temp fix while the repo updates align to stability again. The good thing about cachy is that being based on Arch you’re gonna fully benefit from Arch wiki which is nothing short of double amazing.
Bazzite too is very nice too for gaming setups, but I had a bad experience on the underlying Fedora atomic distro on which I was installing an old printer which required software was not in the repo and which were offered only as .deb packages (made for Debian), which required a socially unacceptable amount of time of tinkering. That means with Bazzite you’re all set if your hw is very streamlined, but if you’re using something peculiar you are on your own.
If you really want the latest updates for gaming, but also benefit from the large adoption of a debian based distro you can also try PikaOS, which is Debian testing release optimized for gaming experience, think about it like a Cachy based on Debian rather than Arch
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pikaos
just keep in mind that in comparison to Mint it surely be less tested, and that anyway even with cachy vs mint in gaming tests the advantages of cachy are practically negligible, and the main difference in perf is given by gfx driver quality, in which specific case nvidia linux drivers are historically the black sheep of the story
Pika is friggen amazing. I started my Linux journey with Bazzite but kept having weird issues and switched to pika. Shit just works and doesn’t get in your way.
I’ve heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down
No this is generally put out there by people that don’t understand the workflow of an atomic distro. Yes the file system directories are generally readonly. You can still layer packages, or use flatpaks and sysexts to add software or install things in a container. There is nothing much that can’t be achieved in an atomic/immutable distro, its just a different workflow. If you want something unbreakable an atomic distro is the way to go
Used both CachyOS and Bazzite. Bazzite works great for Steam Deck like device but for desktop daily driving CachyOS with Cosmic DE never got issues and I was distro hoping a lot before.
