tldr:
What reliable, up-to-date, linux distro would you recommend a gaming softwareengineer and privacy enthusiast?
Full text:
Hey all,
I know this is the age old question, but I would like to ask it anyway.
I am currently switching from windows to linux on my main pc and am on the hunt for a fitting distro. I am a software developer and used to working with wsl, debian servers, etc. I selfhost a bunch of things and know my way around the linux commandline and would call me privacy enthusiast that uses a lot of FLOSS software. I also do occasional gaming but I guess that should work on any distro with enough work.
My thought regarding a few distros:
- I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too “old” for my liking.
- Ubuntu - Canonical is out for me.
- I also looked at fedora, and liked it, but after reading more and knowing it is backed by IBM and that is US based I am not too sure anymore. I ideally would want to have something independent. Although being backed by a company promises continuous work in the future (with the risk of becoming bad).
- OpenSUSE tumbleweed seems promising (german origin!) but also quite intimidating as it is apparently mostly targeted towards power users and I am not sure if it fits an all purpose desktop pc.
- Arch based distros seem great as it contains all the newest packages and is infinitifly customizable. But the KISS nature of arch and the (as far as I understood) high effort to get everything running is a bit intimidating when switching from windows. But I also do like the fact that it ships with only the bare minimum and not anything bloated.
Further more I somehow think that using a base distro (in comparison to a fork of a fork…) is more ideal as they receive updates, etc faster. But that is just a feeling and I couldn’t argue more precisely about it.
Regarding a DE I am definitely going KDE.
I would be very happy for some tips, opinions or pointers in the right direction to continue and finally get rid of windows… Well at least mostly. I guess i will keep it in dual boot as I do play a few games that unfortunately won’t run on linux.
Thanks in advance already!
Fedora is still good for now, but that’s the same for any distro. Any dev can pull shady shit. I really want to check out Nobara, which is Fedora based and designed for gaming. I believe it’s developed and maintained by GloriousEggroll, who we all know from GE-Proton.
But I’m too happy with vanilla Arch and NixOS.
I am a software developer and used to working with wsl, debian servers, etc. I selfhost a bunch of things and know my way around the linux commandline and would call me privacy enthusiast that uses a lot of FLOSS software. I also do occasional gaming but I guess that should work on any distro with enough work.
You’re a power user who has enough technical knowledge to deal with the issues of running bleeding edge.
I’d say Arch, even the manual install isn’t too complicated once you’ve done it a few times and then you’ll have access to the latest and greatest packages.
Occasionally this results in some weird bugs. For example, currently, when waking from suspend my HDMI outputs fail to connect until I change the display properties, so I wrote a bash script to toggle the refresh rate and bound that to a hotkey so I can recover without a display. I’m sure in a day or two a system update will fix it and, if not, I know how to locate the problem (in the system log: kernel: nvidia-modeset: WARNING: GPU:0: HDMI FRL link training failed. ) and report it on the appropriate bug tracker.
If this doesn’t sound intimidating then you’ll be fine as an Arch user.
How about CachyOS?
Based on your write-up, one of the Arch based distros is likely your best bet. My strong recommendation would be EndeavourOS. It is awesome.
If you use EOS, install both the current stable kernel and the LTS one. Use current day-to-day. In the very rare instance that you have a kernel or driver issue, boot into LTS.
Fedora is a great distro. As a non-American, I would say that you do not need to be so focussed on either IBM or the “American” control over Fedora.
1 - Fedora has a great community and a strong commitment to Free Software. Independence from Red Hat’s commercial agenda is the very reason it exists.
2 - Even in a worst case scenario, you are not locked into Fedora and switching is low risk and easy. There is little downside to enjoying Fedora now even if something was to happen later (however unlikely).
3 - modern Linux distros are almost all built from the exact same base elements. Fedora is really no more exposed than anything else.
4 - Red Hat is a driving force behind half the technology at the heart of whatever distro you will end up on including SystemD, Wayland, Pipewire, Glibc, GCC, and the Linux Kernel itself. To repeat point number 3, you are no less exposed to the influence of IBM/Red Hat on Ubuntu or even Arch.
I mean, you could use something like Chimera Linux that avoids SystemD, GCC, and Glibc. But you would still be using Wayland, Pipewire, and of course the kernel. And Chimera does not sound what you are looking for.
I would recommend EOS but I would not avoid Fedora for the reasons you cite.
Good job eliminating Ubuntu.
Doesn’t seem like anyone mentioned it yet, so I’m gonna chime in: Bluefin-DX by Universalblue might be worth a look.
It’s a special developer version of their already interesting and rock solid atomic distro, meaning it’s not rly meant that you do much with the OS part of the filesystem (I’d recommend you read up on it, since I xan’t explain it that well) It has VSCode preinstalled (you can replace it with VSCodium tho with a simple command IIRC) and allows you to doing up virtually endless Linux environments where you install your additional programmes that aren’t available as a Flatpak (you can still use them in the CLI, DW)
I’m on bazzite which I believe is like a sibling or derivative of bluefin. All based on atomic fedora. Atomic means the base system is immutable, which should help with stability. As mentioned elsewhere, for bleeding edge you use flatpak or distrobox. Its been a pleasure to use, I’m very happy.
Tumbleweed absolutely is an all purpose distribution. Most distributions are. Very few are specialised enough to make a difference.
And they really mostly all install the same thing in the end. It doesn’t matter which one you choose. Just pick something that’s not obscure and that has a release cycle that works for you.
For kde, I’d say that the best maintained ones are suse, fedora and kubuntu, in that order (although with the latter you still get Ubuntu, so ymmv).
Well from what you’re saying I’d go for something like EndeavourOS.
Based on arch, usable out of the box but without much preinstalled so that you can do your own mix. Manjaro is a bit similar but with more preinstalled (and maybe more bugs from what I read).
I NEVER recommend Manjaro. They hold back packages for “security/stability” reasons which is antithetical to Arch’s structure. This can cause stability issues (happened to me) and even breaking your system.
didn’t manjaro break the aur twice?
LOL, did they? It wouldn’t surprise me. I remember there was some internal in-fighting going down, someone got accused of stealing funds, buying a personal laptop. Drama aside, it is a dangerous Arch derivative that is highly promoted, especially for newbies. Sad.
Endeavouros is useless, there is no reason to pick it over Arch. It offers no valuable additional features.
EndeavourOS is almost indistinguishable from Arch once installed. On that we agree.
The idea that getting it there has no value is something we can disagree on. You do not have to agree with me. That is not a problem.
I just installed EndeavourOS on a 2020 T2 MacBook Air the other day. All the hardware worked flawlessly after the point and click install. Read the vanilla Arch instructions for that hardware sometime.
EndeavourOS offers a path to installing Arch that is painless and offers a high chance of success. It configures the system well. It is easy to recommend.
Same kernel as Arch, 99.9% of the software is installed from the same repos. AUR is enabled out of the box. Just works. No brainer.
And even though Arch only adds about a dozen optional packages on top of Arch, some of them are pretty useful.
I wish I could install EOS on my M1 Mac… I know threre is Asahi linux, but maintenace and updates have slowed down & stopped?
For good reasons though, hope the mainteners are doing okay. And wish them luck
You say “same kernel as Arch,” but Arch has five officially supported kernels, and you can choose any of them while you build your system. EndeavourOS allows you to switch kernels, but it’s assumed you will install the latest mainline kernel and you are only given LTS and Zen as additional options.
If you use LTS or Zen, or especially if you use Hardened or Real-Time, vanilla Arch is a different experience re:kernel.
Wanted to just chip in and agree that EndeavourOS deserves enormous praise for how much it gets up and running for you straight off the bat.
I run Linux on a 2012 MacBook Pro, more as a hobby than as my main computer.
It’s about the only distro that actually near-enough just works on that particular Mac at this point, with Linux Mint a close second. If I install it from the live image then change my network settings to use WPA 2 security rather than WPA 3 then I have a fully working computer.
Most distros fail to even boot to a working live image on that Mac. And if they do, then I can’t for the life of me get the WiFi working after that.
Being “terminal centric” scared me off at first, but I finally realised how little you actually need to know to install software and keep it updated once you’re up and running.
It’s an amazing distro.
It offers a good installer, a decent out of the box setup, useful helper scripts, and a helpful community. That’s a lot more than Arch!
Give NixOS a look-see. Takes a different approach to package management, but for an engineer that want’s customization abilities it’s probably one of the top choices. I don’t usually recommend this for newbies, but if you’re an engineer it won’t be too bad and simply using it may give you more skills to add to your repertoire when looking for work.
A lot of people put time into maintaining their dotfiles, but NixOS takes that idea to the infrastructure-as-code level when you use it as your daily driver.
ETA: in terms of gaming, with Wine/Proton + Steam/Lutris/Heroic pretty much any distro will be workable
I would recommend Arch, EndeavourOS or Garuda (awesome KDE gaming ed,) and a lot of peeps like CachyOS, mostly for their customized kernels/CPU optimizations. You can get CachyOS kernels inside of Garuda as well.
Cachyos convinced me to be arch based for the first time since 2010.
You sound like a perfect fit for Arch.
But arch seems so overwhelming in comparison to something user friendly like fedora :D And everytime I read something about arch, people complain about its complexity and their tendency to easily break things. I don’t know if I’m ready for that.
You can try void. It is something between arch and traditional distros.
It’s not all that different. Give it a try.
I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too “old” for my liking.
Nowadays, with Flatpaks, so many software providing binaries, etc. this does not matter so much. If you want, you can even use something like Distrobox to have containers for tools using whatever bleeding edge distro you want, but still have a solid stable underpinning.
Debian also has more stuff than you would expect in backports. The main sticking point is yes, you’ll be stuck in Debian 12’s KDE until 13 comes out. But that might be sufficient for you?
(You could also use Debian Testing, which is basically a rolling release. But I’d consider stable first.)
I’ve been recommending Fedora.
You summarize it quite well. But I would still recommend Arch (but as an Arch user since 2008 I am biased on this). Why?
- Lightweight, ideal for gaming. My full-featured Wayland-setup with labwc runs with ca. 2 gigabytes of RAM, including Firefox, which on it’s own currently takes up 800 megabytes. Not that RAM would be an actual issue on modern gaming setups, but still, this shows how little resources the system needs for itself.
- Gaming on Linux is pretty much solved nowadays thanks to Valve (Steam, Proton, etc.) and Flatpaks. Games that do not work are intentionally made to not work on other platforms than Windows due the games using ring0 spyware as DRM and for anti-cheat.
- Privacy by concept – while there are no specific measures taken regarding privacy, the default installation just does nothing except initializing the hardware and allowing the user to sign in. Everything else is up to you.
- Software development is – like gaming – a no-brainer. All common tools work on Linux. Even more: Dependency handling, setting up the environment, using different compilers – all this feels much smoother than on Windows.
- Maintainability is great. Since there are no package changes from upstream, you can be sure that bugs are typically bugs in the software and not coming from Arch packaging.Thanks to rolling release you get much less updates at the same time compared to fixed release distribution – ganted you update regularly. I check the news and update every 1-2 weeks at the weekend.
And since you’re coming from Windows, you have to learn new stuff anyways. So why not dive head first into Arch?
Remember that you can always have current versions of programs by using flatpak and appimage on Debian.
I’m currently on Fedora because my hardware was not supported yet by Debian when I got it. I’ve had a lot more problems with Fedora than Debian though and intend to go back to Debian when 13 comes out and use flatpak for the applications that I really want to be at their current version.
I have similar values to yours re community and privacy.
Just because nobody’s mentioned them yet and they are worth trying out: Solus & Void. Both are independent and rolling distributions.
