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.
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.
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.
Have you found an alternative way to use your house TV with anything other than mouse and keyboard? (Like a remote or something?)
I haven’t tried.
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 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:
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.
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.
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
I would definitely give Bazzite a try. If you are looking for stability and a set and forget OS. If you don’t like it you could always try something else.
If you are looking for something to tinker with and change things like manually changing packages or messing with services you probably want a more traditional “non-atomic” os
Don’t let talk of the filesystem being “read only” scare you. You can still save files to your desktop and documents and stuff in your user folder.
In windows terms it’s more like imagine
C:/windowsbeing read-only so you can’t break your system. You can still write files to other parts of the drive, but it prevents you from messing up your install (some people like this added layer or stability, some don’t like it because it makes tinkering with your system harder)An atomic OS is kinda like a phone OS, in the sense that every version of iOS 26 comes with the same version of Safari and the same libraries. It makes it so any bugs are reproducible and easier for the developers to track down. Packages are pinned to the OS version. (For example all installs of Bazzite 20260101 will include Nvidia drivers 590.44.01-1)
In a more traditional Linux distro because packages can be updated to whatever version if you install Ubuntu the version of Nvidia drivers is not tied to the OS version. You could have an install of Ubuntu 25.10 and could have a completely different Nvidia driver version from someone else on Ubuntu 25.10. This could make bugs harder to trace because you could have the same OS version but different packages. Think of this like even though you and a friend could both have (Windows 11 25H2 installed you could have different drivers installed)
As for updating Bazzite generally auto updates once a week in the background. It requires 0 manual intervention and keeps your packages and drivers up to date. You can turn this off if you wanted to. Since it uses a “image” based approach (again imagine upgrading from iOS 26 -> 26.1) it is able to save the previous version of the OS. So if the upgrade broke something you can roll your system back to a known good state with a single command.
If you are looking for something that’s set and forget I would definitely give it a try.
If you want to tinker with it and figure out how Linux works I would probably try arch or something
Why would anyone stick to one distro? Just jump in figure it out yourself. I had no help and I managed. Find a beater and beat it. I started on mint… now I run 4 distros. JUST DO IT! People will cringe but I like pop OS amoung many other. I just recently installed https://www.coreboot.org/ and linux on a old acer chrome desktop. The documentation was sparse and incomplete but by the grace of dog I got it working. It was a pain in the arse but pretty neato after I was done. I have it on a roling cart to test and set up routers or do things with networks when I need to connect externally to test stuff out. The struggle and the uncertainy is the point… from there it will snowball into you wanting to install linux on every thing. But whats up with this BSD thingie… like I said crack some eggs!!! The feds can crack anything but the point of it all is to take control! Have you tried a bootable USB or virtual machine? I find all distros relativly stable clearly, windows or mac OSX have never met my standards anyways. Always back up your files. Thats my inflated 2 cents. Get some… get off the pot before you forget how to walk!!! Everyones got opinions like they got arse holes. PS. if it is a tower just add more bootable drives. Who cares if it fails cause you got it backed up! When things break it is a oppertunity to learn and cry.
And for trying lots of distros and with a suitably sized USB stick, Ventoy will be useful. Great for storing a load of distros on a stick for live boots and testing versions.
However, there’s a caveat that not all distros support being booted by ventoy. IIRC Bazzite is one such distro and mentioned here a lot.
It’s being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich
for those applications any distro that lets you use docker and docker compose. If you don’t know how to use them, do yourself a favor and learn. It makes self-hosting so much easier and makes the base OS almost irrelevant.
Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work?
Since you seem set on these two, go with Bazzite. Between Distrobox and Docker, Bazzite being an immutable OS seems like a non-issue. After you play around with it, if you feel like you want something that could potentially require more of your time but gives you a little more control, go with CachyOS but ensure you are using ZFS, btrfs, or some other file system that allows rollbacks.
I’ve distro-hopped a lot over the years. Ubuntu (most flavors), Fedora, Debian, Arch, Solus, EndeavourOS, CentOS, Alma, more I’m forgetting, and even some BSDs. Out of all of them, I keep going back to Ubuntu for my servers. I like the release cycles, it’s never given me any issues that I didn’t cause myself, the packages are new enough, the installer lets you set up ZFS and 3rd party tools/software (like Nvidia drivers), and there is a ton of documentation. I want my server to be an appliance, not something I tinker with, and Ubuntu does that really well. If I do feel like tinkering, I do it in a VM or container.
Docker has been the deployment method of choice, thus far, and the plan is to continue that method since I’m already familiar.
I’m not attached to either, I’ve seen a lot of people recommend them. Debian has gotten more than a few recommendations in this thread, so I’m checking out PikaOS now.
As much as I didn’t want to, it’s really seeming like I’m going to need to pick a few a test them out. Bazzite, CachyOS, and PikaOS are all on the list right now. Plan to install steam, install a game or two, and see how things go there. Followed up by a potentially small deployment of Jellyfin and a tiny library to see how easy it is to get hardware transcoding up and running.
You mentioned ZFS or other file systems… And that brings up another question I forgot to add to the OP… As of right now. The plan is to have the media files on the 3 disk pool. I was planning on using ZFS for that, but hadn’t landed on a FS for the OS drive and other storage drive.
Is it common practice to use one FS across all drives? Or would ZFS work well enough on its own for the pool and use a different FS for the OS/storage drives?
Docker has been the deployment method of choice…
Nice 😎
I’m not attached to either, I’ve seen a lot of people recommend them. Debian has gotten more than a few recommendations in this thread, so I’m checking out PikaOS now.
The biggest problem you are going to have is the NVIDIA graphics card. As long as you overcome the hurdle of installing those drivers, any of the popular desktop OSs should be fine. Some people seem to get them going no problem but for others, it’s a show stopper. The OSs that have the option for installing the drivers during installation are nice for that reason.
As much as I didn’t want to, it’s really seeming like I’m going to need to pick a few a test them out…
Yeah. Unfortunately that’s going to be the best way to learn what you want from your OS. It’s equally frustrating and rewarding.
Is it common practice to use one FS across all drives? Or would ZFS work well enough on its own for the pool and use a different FS for the OS/storage drives?
Depends on the environment, really; there’s no wrong answer. ZFS will work fine for its own pool. I would say a FS with snapshotting and rollback capabilities are almost a requirement for Arch based/rolling release distros. You never know when an update might break something.
I’ve been testing out ZFS on my OS drive for my personal server and it’s probably overkill because all the important stuff is on the ZFS pool with backups. My OS drive could shit the bed at any moment and I could switch it out with anything else because of that pool.
You won’t just replace Windows with Linux. You’ll transition.
It takes some time, but it’s not that hard and it pays in the end.
What you are describing sounds like plain old debian. Stable thing that you can occasionnally update, perfect for all your server stuff. All my servers run CLI debian (probably won’t be your case as you mentionned some gaming on it too) and I tend to forget about updating them (or even having them to be honnest) due to how stable the damn thing is.
Do you know about piping? It changed everything for me back then. People do the weirdest complicated things that are mostly a few piped commands. One command if you master awk 🤣 but let’s not go there.
Only piping I’ve heard of is done in the bedroom 🤣
What’s your version of it?? Lol
Hehe, but seriously then you’re yet missing the most awesome thing.
I believe it’s when bakers make patterns on top of pastries and cakes with icing
just download mint and distrohop from there until you feel settled. there’s too many options to make a final decision from the start. mint works out of the box and you get get a hang of it.
OR use cachyos but prepare to open the archwiki frequently
If you have an amd graphics card, fedora (with kde) has been a surprisingly smooth drag and drop replacement for windows. Shits just worked.
choose something with a good track record that won’t go away anytime soon
