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.
Try Bedrock Linux and tell us all about it.
I’ve tried it and while it’s a cool concept, I didn’t have a need for it, and the system felt more unstable (even though I don’t think it really was).
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.
Bluefin will help you learn how to use an immutable distro
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.
Bodhi Linux or ElementaryOS
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 YiffOS
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)
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
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
Cachyos It’s amazing it’s arch on steroids (you may also turn a regular arch install into cachyos if you wish)
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.
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
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
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 )
