For context:
I’ve been using Linux since 2000. Started with Mandrake Linux (Helios?), then I moved to Ubuntu in 2004 and alternated between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE for a time until I settled with Kubuntu for the last few years.
Ubuntu has been rock solid for me for the past 20 years and I’m used to the APT package management and Ubuntu/Debian environment overall with all the various services and configs, setups and release cycles, etc. The stability allows me to enjoy my spare time playing games and doing other important tasks instead of troubleshooting my system and figuring out how to make something work. Ubuntu has been awesome in that regard.
I’ve also been dual-booting this whole time with Windows. Gaming on Linux simply wasn’t up to snuff up until very recently with Steam working on Wine and Proton for the Steam Deck and Bottles, which makes running Windows games on Linux almost comparable to Windows.
Windows 10 was a great OS, except for a few flaws and privacy issues with the introduction of mandatory Microsoft accounts and One Drive integration. But you could work around those things. It was supposed to be the last Windows we would have to install with perpetual rolling releases, but apparently they changed their minds about that. Windows 11 was released and reading about it gives me nightmares. Using it for work also has been an incredibly buggy and frustrating experience. The invasion of privacy, data collection, screen monitoring and AI integration plus the additional advertisement are all reasons for which I will never install this OS on my personal computer. And some of these features have started to leak into Windows 10.
So I’ve made up my mind. I’m wiping Windows from my PC and will be running Linux only. I believe it’s become good enough to use as a daily driver for a home gaming desktop and for productivity. But… Which distribution should I choose?
The dilemma:
There’s been a whole slew of new Linux distributions that have come out lately. Some have been early in the Linux gaming aspect such as POP! OS. Others have tried to become a solid replacement for the default immutable Steam OS such as Bazzite. And there are now some pretty awesome sounding gaming-focused distros such as Nobara. And that’s on top of the various existing Ubuntu flavors, Fedora’s spins, OpenSuse and the many Arch variants that almost seem to pop up monthly.
I’ve been shopping around for a distribution to become my daily driver from now until who knows when. I’m expecting to stick to that distro as long as possible. Here’s some of the things that I am looking for:
- Not immutable : I find this to be adapted for devices like tablets, IoT devices and handhelds instead of an actual PC. I’ll need to be able to change my system configs as I please and an Immutable distro seems like a pain in the butt to deal with that.
- Rock solid : This is the most important aspect and is why a lot of the Arch or other bleeding edge distros won’t do. (With some exceptions)
- Hardware support : The second most important aspect. I think that’s pretty much covered by most popular distros, but some have better support than others. Especially for ease of getting the right drivers. (Especially for NVidia GPUs, or gaming controllers and devices.)
- Performance : Most popular distros offer ok performance, but some have been enhanced to provide improved performance according to the hardware. This is a very big nice to have, especially for gaming.
- Desktop choice : I’m really not a big fan of Gnome 3. It seems nobody really is. Many Gnome based distros come with quality of life extensions out of the box to fix that. Not a big fan of GTK apps’ UI ergonomics either. That’s why I prefer KDE over Gnome or Cinnamon. Budgie seems like a great alternative as well. Also having a PowerToys-style FancyZones tiling system is a big big plus (KDE has that OOTB)
- Applications : The thing I love about Ubuntu is the amount of available applications in their repos. I’m hoping to have the same availability in my next distribution.
- Online community/support : Having a great online support community is very important. The more users, the larger the knowledge base and the easier you can find answers to questions to troubleshoot problems.
- Online services integration : Optional but a very nice to have would be to have integration with Google apps like GMail, Calendar, Keep and Google Drive to name a few.
- Customization : As funny as this sounds, I want to use the desktop in its most vanilla form as possible with as few customisations as possible. Over time I found that having extra customisations like extensions, applets, etc tends to break things because of lack of support over time. It’s also more difficult to troubleshoot when very few people are using them.
The distributions that ended up meeting my requirements are the following in order of preferences :
- Kubuntu : So far its been working great for gaming but I think there could be some performance improvements. It’s my first choice because I’m just so comfortable with it already. Zero effort, but with some compromises in performance.
- Nobara with KDE Plasma : This looks solid and ticks all the requirements. I think there’s some amount of learning to do for using YUM/RPM packages and to understand some of the customisations, but I think this effort will be minimal. I am concerned about long term support however since this is a fairly new distro supported by individuals.
- Ubuntu Budgie : I really like this DE, very simple but elegant. But, like Kubuntu, I don’t know how it’s going to fare performance wise. And I don’t know what kind of tools there are to configure gaming controllers, etc.
- Ubuntu (I’m willing to deal with Gnome 3 for simplicity’s sake)
- Fedora KDE Plasma spin : Everybody is raving about Fedora so maybe I’ll give it a shot as an Ubuntu replacement.
ManjaroEndeavour OS with KDE desktop :Possibly the only Arch distro I’m willing to install because they focus on stability, however learning about the packaging system and configs/environment feels like a drag. But with the great community and documentation I’m willing to make an effort for this one.
What are your thoughts on this? What are your recommendations based on my requirements?
EDIT:
Thank you very much for everyone’s input. I’ve spent a good part of the day installing distros in a VM to check out some of your suggestions and reading more about my choices.
I can’t believe I am saying this, but I am reevaluating my choice of using Kubuntu. After some reading I have found out that Ubuntu and it’s flavors will not be supporting flatpaks starting in 23.04. And there are several known problems with snap, such as serious performance issues. A task that would take 1-5s as a regular .deb installed app, would take up to 10 times that time to complete. Canonical is also working to modify apt to use snaps instead of installed .deb packages. They are aggressively pushing snaps to a point where they’ll want to replace the majority of the software with snaps eventually.
Yeah there’s security features built-in and all, which flatpaks don’t necessarily have. And the security is tighter around Canonical’s snap repos compared to flathub for example. But I don’t know if I’m ready to move to that new way of doing things. And Canonical is going against what the community wants.
I don’t know. I think I’m more confused now that I was when I started…
This might not help, but I’d seriously recommend reconsidering Arch derivatives.
I’ve been 100% Linux for almost 2 years now, with Garuda Linux on my primary desktop and Fedora on my laptop. I’ve had zero major issues with Garuda (and very few minor ones, to the point I can’t think of any specific problems in the moment), gaming performance has been fantastic, and the availability of software in the AUR is nothing short of amazing.
In my experience, keeping up with updates is not at all an impediment to use, and I’ve yet to have stability issues of any kind. I’ve been seriously considering replacing Fedora with Garuda on my laptop, the experience has been so smooth.
Just stay away from Manjaro. I feel like Arch fan-boys being dicks and people recommending Manjaro to new Linux converts are the only two problems with Arch (or at least its derivite distros, I haven’t raw dogged vanilla Arch before).
I’m a die-hard Ubuntu fan, but just use whatever works for you.
Same. But I’ve been questioning my loyalty lately because of their obsession with Snap. Canonical has been increasingly imposing their business decisions on their users and it’s a bit off putting.
I’m considering moving to Fedora or maybe even OpenSuse. Possibly even Endeavor! I can’t believe I’d ever consider an Arch based distro.
Honestly this research has left me even more indecisive about what to install. But I have an increasingly big feeling that I might be ditching Ubuntu. I don’t think anyone should be messing with APT in such a way that it would end up installing snap packages instead of debian packages. This is too much.
They should simply provide the option to use snaps to users in the app store and not enforce it like with some apps, such as Firefox and Thunderbird.
For gaming you want the latest updates. Of all the major distros, only Arch, Suse and Fedora provide that. Arch requires you to learn to about and fix breakage. Fedora has a gaming spin which works like a Steam Deck: Bazzite.
I’ve distro hopped between 10+ distros, and Bazzite has been the only one that gave me a rock solid stability and latest drivers simultaneously. It’s not purely immutable, Fedora calls it Atomic.
I suggest you try it, and tell me if there was anything you couldn’t do.
Also: I don’t support Canonical’s walled garden
I hear a lot of people say that you need bleeding edge distros for gaming. But the Steam Deck uses and old Debian release and it works just fine. Granted they have their own proprietary drivers and all.
Gaming on Ubuntu works just fine. Others reported using Debian stable too and it’s fine. I don’t think you need to be bleeding edge. In fact, I think it might bring instability. You gotta make a compromise between the two in my opinion.
I have to add, regarding Canonical’s walled garden, that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the vast majority of people out there. It might even be a big advantage, espeically for non-tech people.
I’ve enjoyed Ubuntu distros for 20 years. But it’s Canonical’s attitude that’s off putting.
By the way, I’ve tried Bazzite and it’s too bloated with too much stuff OOTB. But it’s great though otherwise. I’m a bit skeptical about immutable distros however.
Steamos on the steam deck is arch based, the original steam os on steam machines were Debian based
Ah? Oh yeah! Hey thanks for the clarification.
Manjaro
I highly recommend avoiding manjaro like the plague, their team is incredibly incompetent (see: https://manjarno.pages.dev/ ), I say this as someone who has given people manjaro for years and regretted it, I was also their it person, manjaro regularly broke every few months and gave people a very bad taste of linux
for example, why are kernels given version numbers in packages? This caused 3 separate peoples computers to break multiple times. Everything good about manjaro comes from arch, everything bad about manjaro comes from the manjaro team.
Y’know how it’s not rolling release because they delay packages by 2 weeks? They actually do no testing in this time. How do I know this? They pushed an update that caused steam to uninstall your desktop environment. Famously covered by linus tech tips… this is something that should have easily been caught, and yet the two week window did absolutely nothing.
the truth is for manjaro there is no real usecase, there’s no set of desires that align with manjaro being the best choice for you. I am not asking you to switch away from manjaro, but I do not think we should ever recommend it to anyone, and on your next machine, I recommend trying the arch installer.
But if what you’re looking for is an easy pre-setup arch, use endeavoros
If you want something simple and up to date, use fedora kinoite
If you’re a power user and want to configure every little thing about their system, use arch or nixos
If you don’t care at all about updates and want the most rock solid system possible, debian.
Yeah! That’s what I heard! Apparently they don’t follow the Arch standards at all and kind of do their own thing which messes everything up.
No, I was actually thinking of Endeavor OS. I got it mixed up with Manjaro in my head. BIG difference!
I won’t consider Manjaro at all. Don’t worry. But thanks a lot for the warning! 😁
Linux newbie here, so this information may be for other newbies. I tried Nobara when I had problems with my Manjaro. But Nobara fresh out the box had some problems and it being a “one person project” kinda bugged me. Also not having the AUR(Arch User Repository) anymore was making me try Endeavour OS.
Manjaro is pretty good, but Endeavour OS has better Nvidia integration, also it comes with yay and other quality of life stuff already setup. Better for a noob like me.
Oh, I also tried Fedora KDE but at that point I was hooked to Arch. It is just so much easier to install programs from AUR with the terminal than what other distros try with “app-stores”
Hi! Yeah upon further reading thanks to the great replies I received here, I’ve reconsidered using Nobara. The one guy’s project aspect of it scares me in terms of long term support. This needs to become an official Fedora project or even community project supported by a community at least.
I was really thinking of Endeavour OS rather than Manjaro. But I’ve never used an Arch based distro before. Been on Ubuntu flavors for the past 20 years. I mean there’s probably people on here that replied that weren’t even born when I started using it lol!!! (Fuck I’m old)
Reading about AUR gives me a feeling of insecurity. It sounds like a repo of packages that anyone can push and distribute.
Also, I remember there being some issues with Arch, among other distros, being too bleeding edge and receiving packages with security problems. Something about a backdoor in SSH. Maybe being too bleeding edge is a double “edged” sword.
You’re wrong about immutable, nixos is extremely confiurable, I’d say even more than a normal distro
https://www.howtogeek.com/why-i-use-nixos-and-why-you-should-too/
check them out, I actually think there’s no downside these days, I say this with a customized down to every detail setup that I moved from arch, no reason not to go immutable these days if you’re new to linux especially
My advice: try them all and see what works.
I’d recommend nobara if you don’t like gnome, but I am fairly biased towards it, so idk what my recommendation is worth.
Endeavor is also a decent choice, provided that you wanna deal with some arch Linux quirkiness from time to time.
But yeah, try them all and see what works best…
Yeah I don’t know if I want to “deal” with anything. I just want to install it and forget it. I might be steering towards more stable established distros.
My advice is: make your data eternal, not your distro. Your kde config and customization should work across distros (but don’t dualboot with 2 distros messing in the same /home). Don’t know about you, but I like the separated work/play dynamic I have with linux/windows so I’m waiting for bazzite to become dual bootable with linux to be my playstation. If you put your game library on it’s own partition/disk you can mount it from dualboot distros.
Every distribution is always the most stabellest, maintained piece of software on their website but fuckups happen, teams change, users get blamed for exotic circumstances tarnishing their reputation. Have a backup and use whatever feels right currently.
Pop_os is also ubuntu based btw, hate the name but maybe system76 is able to keep you safe from the snappification while you use what you are accustumed to?
Thanks for the advice, but I want to avoid dual-booting altogether. I would prefer to install and forget. Then upgrade when new stable releases come around.
Re the flatpak issue, what you linked is just saying that flatpak won’t be a default installed program and packages provided by flatpaks won’t be officially supported by Ubuntu support as of 23.03. I don’t think this effects your use of Ubuntu in any way. If you want to use flatpaks, just install the program. It will still be packaged in the Ubuntu repositories. 23.04 was over a year ago. I still use flatpak without a problem on my kubuntu 24.04 system. It’s just a one time thing to do
sudo apt-get install flatpakand maybe a second package for KDE’s flatpak packagekit back end and it’s like canonical never made that decision.The push of snaps instead of debs is a bit more concerning because it removes the deb as an option in the official repositories. But as of right now I think only Mozilla software has this happening? If your timeline is 5-10 years though, this may be more of an issue depending on how hard canonical pushes snaps and how large their downsides remain
Great reply! Thank you for the clarification.
What’s your opinion on Canonical’s behavior with snaps? Like having Mozilla software exclusively as snaps? Are people making too much of a big deal?
Nice list, though I would remove Manjaro from that. Manjaro is far from stable, they just delay Arch packages without even testing and it will bork itself in no time or will cause some problems at least.
Anyway, I see you have included Fedora based, so I would like to suggest OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I installed it on my sister’s PC and she’s been happily using it for some time now. Previously she borked Manjaro and brake updates on Pop OS just by using the system via GUI. That didn’t happen on Tumbleweed yet and I don’t think it will. Even if something would happen, she can revert everything by selecting a recovery image from GRUB and continue using it.
Interesting!
Try Endeavour OS, its like Manjaro but less problematic
Yeah, actually I think I might have had those two mixed up. I think what I meant was Endeavour.
+1 being happy on Endeavour OS for a year of two now.
Really? I have some questions:
- How’s stability? Have you had any issues overtime?
- How’s support for gaming?
- What about security? I know Ubuntu is very strict on that aspect which is why I trust the packages that are delivered. But what about Arch/Endeavour? Especially regarding AUR?
I really like cachyos myself.
Someone else mentioned it in this thread. But I don’t know if I want to install a fringe distro instead of something that’s established and stable with long term support from a solid community or company. But who knows.
Yeah I totally get that. I’ve been loving it though :)
Nice write up, seems like you know what you are jumping into atleast. Personally would recommend to give Bazzite a try and not rule out immutables too quickly, nothing is more solid than these variants. If not immutable, then my best experience lies with Opensuse TW by far. Super stable, yet bleeding edge.
Thanks. I understand your point of view but I want to have the liberty of changing system configs on the fly. I also tried it in a VM and found that it was a bit bloated with too much stuff OOTB. Might be nice for a gaming console, but I don’t think I need all of that.
One thing about OpenSuse Tumbleweed is I’m afraid I might have trouble finding some of the software I need in their repos and it might be a pain in the butt to manage? Then again I never used an OpenSuse based distro so. Maybe I oughta try it out in a VM first.
Personally never had a problem finding what i needed for opensuse. Its easy to add repos via yast, plus opensuse you can use both zypper plus obs package managers, the latter being quite fast and easy to use. OpenSuse also has support for rpm packages, meaning anything meant for rhel/Fedora systems can also be installed on opensuse.
You can also view all installable packages here: https://software.opensuse.org/packages
If you feel TW is too fast on the release cycle you can also try Slowroll, which is TW but with a slower release cycle.
Thanks for your feedback! Yeah thankfully they use RPM and it’s a very popular packaging system. I love how OpenSuse’s YaST allows you to easily configure your sources. It’s a very basic looking app but is straight to the point with a lot of very nice admin features.
You might look at Aurora or Bluefin, if Bazzite wasn’t your cup of tea. They’re more of a vanilla distro while being part of the Universal Blue family. They also have DX variants for devs, if that’s something you want.
I haven’t had trouble messing with configs on Bazzite, so I wonder what you need to tweak that isn’t possible on an immutable system.
I can see the use cases for these Universal Blue based distros. They look like fun. But I really don’t see the appeal in my case.
I’ll check them out still. I’m curious about how they operate. Thanks for the suggestions!
I just started using Bazzite. It’s my second attempt at a Linux gaming setup (Pop_OS was first, Bazzite is working out much better).
What made you lean away from Bazzite, if you don’t mind expanding on that?
It’s an immutable OS. That’s not what I’m looking for. I find it too restrictive. Plus it comes loaded with way too much gaming software. I don’t need all that stuff. I’d rather install as I need.
Thank you for the reply.
I’m just getting into these things. And immutability seems like a double edged sword.
I’m not sure what performance improvements you’re talking about. As far as I’m aware, the difference between distros on performance is extremely minimal. What does matter is how up to date the DE is in the distribution provided package. For example, I wanted some nvidia+Wayland improvements that were only in kwin 6.1, and so I switched from kubuntu to neon in order to get them (and also definitely sacrificed some stability since more broken packages/combinations get pushed to users than in base ubuntu). It’s also possible that the kernel version might matter in some cases, but I haven’t run into this personally.
I think the main differences between distros is how apps are packaged and the defaults provided, and if you’re most comfortable with apt based systems, I’m not sure what benefit there’s going to be to switching (other than the joy in tinkering and learning something new, which can be fun in its own right).
For some users less experienced with linux, the initial effort required to setup Ubuntu for gaming (installing graphics drivers/possibly setting kernel options, etc) might push someone toward a distribution that removes that barrier, but the end state is going to be basically identical to whatever you’ve setup yourself.
The choice between distributions is probably more ‘what do I want the process to getting to my desired end state to be like’ and less ‘how do I want the computer to run’.
I’m not sure what performance improvements you’re talking about. As far as I’m aware, the difference between distros on performance is extremely minimal.
Maybe. But according to the Nobara homepage, they have added a number of kernel patches to the kernel and other performance tweaks that’s provided with their distro out of the box. This could be an advantage for a gaming-focused PC use. From what I hear, these little extras can provide quite a few more frames per second
And as far as the whole X11 vs Wayland thing, as long as everything works I’ll be happy. And for now, that seems to be with X11 until absolutely everything works with Wayland, which is not the case from what I read online.
The difference between Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat/Fedora isn’t huge. APT and YUM work fairly the same way. I don’t think that’s a big learning curve, especially since I’ve worked with YUM in the past for work. And I’d be sacrificing Snaps which isn’t a big deal for me.
All those patches seem like nice things to have, but are more focused on adding hardware support and working around bugs in software/other people’s implementations. If you have one of the effected GPUs/games/etc, then those patches probably make a huge difference, but I’d guess there won’t be noticeable frame rate differences on most systems. I have not tested this claim though, so maybe something on there makes a big difference. What’s nice is all the packaging stuff they’ve done to make setting things up correctly easily, not necessarily most of the changes themselves. Like on my system I compile dxvk and various wine nvidia libs myself since Ubuntu doesn’t package them. And it’s easy to screw that up/it requires some knowledge of compiling things
Reading your update, I’d still choose whatever distro packages the software you want with the versions/freshness you need. If you’re willing to tweak things, then the performance stuff can be done yourself pretty easily (unless you have broken hardware that isn’t well supported by the mainline kernel), but packaging things/compiling software that isn’t in the repositories is a huge pain. I think this is one of the reasons people choose arch even with its need to stay on top of updates. Is that the AUR means that you don’t have to figure out how to build software that the distribution managers didn’t package. Ubuntu’s PPAs aren’t great (though I don’t have personal arch experience to compare with)
Like on my system I compile dxvk and various wine nvidia libs myself since Ubuntu doesn’t package them.
Huh?? I’m using Kubuntu 24.04 right now and didn’t have to jump through these hoops. That’s weird.
but packaging things/compiling software that isn’t in the repositories is a huge pain.
I don’t know. I’m a developer that’s been using Ubuntu distros for 20 years and never ran into such issues.
Thank you for your feedback. I agree with you. In hindsight, Nobara doesn’t bring that big of an advantage. And I further discovered that it’s a one-man project. So that’s not so great for long term support and continuity.
I think I’ll have to make another post about my findings or write a guide or something. I’ve learned a lot, especially because of everyone in this thread. I really opened my eyes and broke down some preconceptions I had about certain distros.
Sounds like you’re ready to join the
cultclub of Debian.It’s stable, performancet, and adaptable. Tons of window manager options. And I’ve found that anything I like from *buntu distros I can backport into Debian by finding a .deb file.
You know what? I’m taking back what I said. Debian might just be what I’m looking for after all.
Uses .deb packages with APT, which I am very comfortable with. And thanks to Ubuntu using the same package system, I can easily add any PPMs or other repos that Ubuntu uses.
Its stable releases are the most stable out there and with a 2 year release cycle on average, that’s pretty similar to Ubuntu’s and is totally acceptable.
People complaining that the packages are older, that’s really not a problem for me. I’m patient. I can wait. Worst case I’ll use a flatpak for a desktop app or compile from source. I’ve done it before. It’s not that hard. And for my purposes, that doesn’t happen very often. Or there’s the option of using backports as well.
Hardware support is solid. All the drivers I need are provided as .deb packages or through 3rd party repos provided by the manufacturer. (NVidia) And media codecs are available now so that’s not an issue either.
Debian is the next best thing to Ubuntu IMO. A pretty solid choice I think.
Yeah, I used it for work once when I worked at Xandros back in 2008.
It’s like Ubuntu, minus the quality of life customizations. Might as well stick with an Ubuntu flavor.
Look into Spiral Linux if you want to go with Debian. I believe it includes several quality of life improvements while being mostly just an easy way to install Debian (kind of like how EndeavorOS is for Arch).
ETA: also, look at NixOS, since it might be the combination of stability and semi-mutability you’re looking for.
Thanks, but if I’m going to use a Debian based OS, I might as well stick with one that mainstream, is backed by a company and has a large user community with a big knowledge base. So might as well use Ubuntu.
Spiral is Debian. Like Endeavor, it’s primarily a way to install Debian with a few sane defaults and graphical choosers to install other software. Otherwise, it’s just Debian.
Try it in a VM. I was surprised how fast it was even in that limited environment, and if not for the fact that I want/need a newer kernel, I might have chosen that one.
But otherwise, sounds like you’ve kind of already chosen.
