wanting to hop into the world of linux on a dual boot method (one of my favorite games unfortunately cannot be run on linux at all, and it’s a gacha. I don’t want to gamble with my account being banned, so I’m keeping windows for it specifically.) this’ll be my second go at it, I used Pop!_OS briefly but had some issues with wifi and didn’t love the GNOME layout. I have a new distro picked out, but I just was curious what other people are using in this community. was also wondering what made you fall on your current one.
and maybe as some bonus questions, what are some distros you’ve tried but didn’t like? what about a distro you want to try eventually? I’ve seen distrohopping is a thing, hahaha.
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Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.
this is actually what I’m going to be giving a go! I have very little experience (I have servers that run Debian and DietPi, but I get help with those) with linux but I’m really excited to give the KDE version a try. and I’ve been trying to learn, too, because also my partner is going to be moving to a dual boot setup as well. been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot too, especially while my desktop is out of commission.
do you find that anything is missing in Bazzite for you?
The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.
The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.
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Debian! It’s stable, elegant, and doesn’t impede customization. I distro-hopped a lot over the years - some that I ended up disliking included KaOS (severely limited software repository), Clear Linux (only way to get ffmpeg was to compile it from source) and Fedora (very slow); most I liked, and just decided to move on at some point. But I kept coming back to Debian, and eventually got to a point where instead of trying a different distro when Debian broke, I would just reinstall Debian.
I’d be interested to try VanillaOS or another “immutable” distro at some point in the future. See if they’ve matured enough for my day-to-day use.
Debian stable on Thinkpad 1 and Debian testing on Thinkpad 2. Testing is nice because Gnome is a slightly better version. Stable is nice because it doesn’t bother me about updates.
What don’t you like about gnome?
I didn’t particularly like the layout styling in Pop!_OS and being so new to linux, I didn’t know how much I could change aesthetics wise. KDE looks more appealing to me, I don’t know if it’s because it looks like windows, but that might be a factor? it’s the default on the distro I wanna give a try (Bazzite) which also has nudged me in that direction.
I wasn’t expecting so many people to have used Debian for things other than servers. I have it on a server myself, but I decided I needed something more set up for gaming already on my desktop. what led you to Debian specifically? the stability?
Pretty much. I used mint for a while, then Ubuntu, upgrading every October and April. Then I tried Debian on a laptop I didn’t want to update often, and realized it’s not really missing anything that Ubuntu has.
Although I think the main thing that lead me to Debian was some issue with snap that I was having
Antix! It has a couple of rough patches but overall I really like it. Mainly I like having my RAM back
I’m on MX Linux
My current distro is NixOS - mainly as I’ve built my NAS/homelab. Definitely not recommended for a new player to Linux!
If you like or need the latest software, use a rolling distro. I use Manjaro (boo, hiss) and really like it. But if you don’t want the Arch users to beat you up and pants you, I hear Endeavour OS is pretty good.
I use EndeavourOS because I like having access to the AUR but didn’t want to risk messing up my Windows installation by trying to manually set up Arch for dual booting (this was before
archinstallwas made). I like it, and I like using KDE. My only complaint with it would be that pacman kinda shits itself if you go too long without updating.The first distro I ever used was ZorinOS back in like 2017.
Debian, Mint, Arch (by the way).
Had Ubuntu as my main driver for about 2 years but didn’t like Gnome and had more trouble with an Nvidia card than on Mint or Arch.
Fedora is top of my to-try-list but I’m not a distro-hopper, so who knows when I’ll have a use case.
Bazzite Linux running KDE Plasma 6. It’s a wonderful distro based on Fedora 40 (I think, still kinda new) and it’s made for gaming.
I have a few machines, which run:
- Raspbian Bookworm (arm64) with IceWM - Raspbian is the only desktop RPi distro that works out-of-the-box. I chose IceWM because it’s fast, light, customisable, and I can make it look like it’s 2004.
- openSUSE Tumbleweed with Xfce+Bspwm - I keep going back to openSUSE. It just works. As for the desktop, I wanted Xfce but with tiling.
- Mageia 9 with LXQt - I just needed something lighter than Fedora Xfce, as this machine only has 4GB of RAM.
- FreeBSD with i3 - Thought I’d give BSD a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
- Gentoo (WIP) - I’m just throwing random distros at my MacBook until something sticks. Gentoo is fast and can control the fan without me having to git clone and compile the drivers (ironically).
- crunchbang++ (i386) with Openbox - This is a mid-2000s MacBook, running one of the few Linux distros that actually boots on it.
Some distros I tried but did not like were Pop!_OS, Slackware, Zenwalk, Freespire, Redcore, Fedora Atomic, ArchBang, and antiX.
Sone distros I’d like to try are Qubes OS, Clear Linux, CRUX, Kwort, Paldo, Exherbo, NuTyX, T2, Chimera, Adélie, Frugalware (no new ISOs since 2016, but the packages are still updated), Dragora, Parabola, Hyperbola, PLD, KANOTIX, Calculate, ALT, ROSA, and AUSTRUMI.
The reasons I have not yet tried these are mostly down to my limited hardware and the complexity of some of the distros. With others, it’s often down to WiFi drivers not existing for my proprietary cards. And then there are also a couple of distros from Russia, which I feel I can’t trust at the moment.
I’m on Pop_OS and really like it. I chose it because i have a 2080, so the nvidia specific package is great for me. No WiFi issues, but I almost always have it hard wired, so not much chance to have it go wrong
I am using CentOS 9 in WSL. I don’t particularly care what distribution I use because I mostly using a bash shell as a software development environment. I prefer apt to flat packs and use ubuntu 20 on an embedded system that I write code for at work. I keep wanting to get more experience with KDE and gnome, but I haven’t been good about using my free time to mess with OS. As long as I have vim and a prompt that uses vi input, I am pretty content. (Does this make me sound old? The kids at work have trouble following what I am doing when we pair program.)
I’m currently using Kubuntu, although I’m planning on switching to Debian or maybe NixOS at some point. Kubuntu works, but I don’t like snaps, and even though I’ve removed them I’d rather just not ever have to deal with them.
I first started with Mint, but didn’t like gnome/cinnamon which is why I switched to Kubuntu, but other than that it was fine.
