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:/windows being 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

Work: RustRover on MacOS Personal: RustRover on Bazzite

Mainly language support plugins: Python, .env, mermaid

I’ve found LocalSend really nice for this purpose. If you need to send stuff over your wifi to other devices but not sync it in the background it’s really nice

This reminds me of a question I saw a couple years ago. It was basically why would you stick with bare metal over running Proxmox with a single VM.

It kinda stuck with me and since then I’ve reimaged some of my bare metal servers with exactly that. It just makes backup and restore/snapshots so much easier. It’s also really convenient to have a web interface to manage the computer

Probably doesn’t work for everyone but it works for me

WASM in the browser is cool but I think WASI is going to be the big game charger to come out of WASM

I believe SteamOS is designed only for the steam deck, I wouldn’t recommend it as a general purpose OS for a desktop or laptop.

I would recommend Bazzite, it’s like a general version of SteamOS. It comes with a version that boots directly into steam’s big picture mode (like SteamOS) or one that boots into the desktop (I run this on my desktop)

It also has improvments like nvidia drivers, printer drivers, package layering and because it’s built on top Fedora Atomic you can rollback the system to a stable snapshot if an update doesn’t work with your system.

I’ve been running on my desktop since September (I was in the same boat as you) and it’s been really good. A lot of the stuff I would’ve had to configure and mess around with is already setup for gaming

I just did this in September. I would second bazzite. I have a Nvidia GPU and I haven’t had a single issue with it. Bazzite is atomic/immutable which makes it more difficult to modify the system or add packages but honestly I haven’t actually needed to modify the system or add any packages. It also has A/B partitions and stores the last OS update so if something gets corrupted or an update doesn’t work you can roll back really easily. I know some people will say if you want to use Linux you need to be comfortable with using the terminal but I haven’t had to touch it.

Back in 2016 I ran Ubuntu on a laptop and I remember having to install everything from apt and tweak stuff. I also remember accidentally messing up my system and having to do a fresh install. Flatpaks have really changed it since then.

You can checkout https://flathub.org to see what apps are available in the built in app store. You can also look at https://protondb.com to see how well specific windows games run on Linux and any tweaks that might help them run better.

I still have a windows partition though since SteamVR doesn’t work on Linux and discord screen sharing doesn’t work on Wayland

I just got a steam deck and I’m surprised how well it runs games. It’s not quite as refined as a switch but it can run games were designed to run windowed in Windows with a mouse and keyboard. It can translate the game to run on Linux, the inputs to a gamepad and convert the game from being windowed to fullscreen. It’s impressive and if the games were actually designed for the deck I feel like it could feel as seemless as the switch.

It is really making me consider Linux for my desktop once Windows 10 reaches EoL. The only game I’ve found that doesn’t work is Destiny 2. Even the desktop mode on the deck is surprisingly nice