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There's an atomic Fedora spin made for gaming, Bazzite, and the experience has been to install, and just go. Everything works, everything is set up for gaming and performance monitoring, it's actually baffling how good this is!
I realise I' sounding like a shill, but genuinely it's great and seems to be what you're looking for. You can always just try it in a VM!
Bazzite seems superior for handhelds or just pure gaming setups, I game like 20% of the time maybe less these days
Ah, I do use Mint on my dev laptop but Bazzite on my gaming PC, each has their own usage.
It's really just Fedora with different defaults, pre-installed software (mostly for Steam, MangoHUD, etc.) and a welcome-screen that helps you set up different software.
It's also immutable
It's really just atomic Fedora [..]*
If it's worth anything I daily drive Bazzite but also only game around 20% of the time. It's still a great daily driver, does all I need it to do. Let me know if I can answer any questions.
Prob gonna stick with cachy since im not having any issues, why do you like fedora/bazzite over arch/cachy? I cant really tell the difference
Not familiar with either arch or cachyOS, but I'm gonna go and guess that cachy isn't immutable(?) At least to me it's nice to know that neither myself or anyone else can break my system as all system files are read only. Additionally I quite like that I don't have to think about configuring or updating anything - it's all handled by the devs. That might not be for everyone but personally don't want to tinker with my PC that much, I have a server for that 😅
That said, it isn't fun for firmware development.
I have daily driven it for 6 months or so. Most things work great but more niche uses like embedded firmware development, digitally signing documents (impossible on bazzite as far as I have found) and anything that requires udev rules or interplay between software.
Otherwise it is great! Much better day to day than opensuse Kalpa.
Ill check it out, only time I heard it mentioned was someone saying cachyos is superior if you dont mind a bit of tinkering
Fedora. It just works. I use it for work and it doesn't let me down. Semi annual upgrading it is easy and it seems to be moving slowly, because gnome/LibreOffice is, to flatpaks. It's slow to change and stable because of it, they still include Grub when it became a relic since systemd included gummyboot (systemd-boot) many years ago.
Contrast that with ArchLinux which is 'cleaner' and a rolling distro which I prefer; Fedora isn't. I use it for a Rescue USB. I used to use it for work but, and this is long ago, I managed to break it quite easily by 'fixing it' too much! ArchLinux doesn't let me down but I don't have a gui or Window manager on it, console only, and I know my way around Linux reasonably well.
Debian is still confused about systemd. Run a combination of testing and unstable branches on the desktop and you've got a great system but this is before the systemd days where they moved all the systemd defaults to the old/odd places that make no sense. As you say, snap appears to be another mad experiment by Ubuntu, like mir when everyone went to wayland.
If you're going to use your PC for games, I think there may be better distros than these. I'm not a gamer so I can't advise.
I'm not a huge fan of derivative distros, like Ubuntu (based on Debian decreasingly) or so on. I'm not one to mess about with screen savers etc and aesthetics though. To me derivatives add bloat and unexpected changes.
Source distros are a rabbit hole I've been down. They were fun but I couldn't get myself to do any work when I had them.
I've never tried SUSE, it's alternative rpm style distro which can be stable as a rolling.
Distrowatch.com is always worth a visit. Find a/several forum that is your intended use and find out which district they use there; if you have issues they'll know how to fix it.
I think I heard fedora will never be supported by a ps3 emulator because of some core issues and that turned me away initially, some youtuber was swapping away from it, though now im not sure and it may have been some other distro, cant find info online
Nobara looks interesting for fedora, do you have experience with it? Or anyone else seeing this comment. Nvm its developed by one dude
Not just any dude. That's Glorious Eggroll! As in GE from GE-Proton.
Debian laptop user here, left Windows on my gaming desktop for a decent while. Now that I'm more accustomed to Linux DE's I installed Nobara on it about a month ago. Zero issues with the NVIDIA variant on my 3080 so far
I use Nobara on my desktop and Fedora on my laptop, they both work fine, although I've had a few audio issues on Nobara, but it could be the different hardware. I don't play emulators, but every game I've tried on Nobara worked with no fiddling, just recently: Cyberpunk 2077, Subnautica, Horizon Forbidden West, X4...
I've been using Fedora for I don't know how long, over a decade I'd say, and it's hard to overstate it's stability, it just works, and has great repos. My main annoyance is the frequent major version updates, it's a quick process anyway, and I never had problems.
Have you looked at tumbleweed? Its a rolling release so its always up to date but opensuse's testing is fantastic. It's very stable and on the off chance there's a regression that impacts usability, it has built in version snapshots. It takes literally 45 seconds to roll back to a previous working version.
I had been rocking CachyOS for a year or so but the recent Nvidia drivers or something caused me a shit load on instability so I'm back on windows for now. Got tired of tinkering. 😅
I use cachyos for gaming and work. It's amazing. Stable, fast, drivers all work with no extra setup. Just select Ext4 during installation if you want the fastest hard drive performance.
Have you checked out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed? Very stable rolling release. I've been using it for a couple years without issues.
If you want CachyOS I highly recommend you to have atleast Haswell or Alteast Ryzen If you use AMD due to their Compiled packages and stuff.
Endeavor os If you don't have atleast haswell/Ryzen.
Stock Arch If your fine building it.
Debian I wouldn't recommend to use for a pc you use often.
Popos I never used it before but it seems like a "stable gaming" Distro.
Mint is also a great option I use it on pcs I sometimes use and it's also easy to use.
I have ryzen
While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.
I would suggest avoidig pure rolling distros then. Also bear in mind that usually the performance difference between distros is not really big enough to make a difference for most things.
I would consider something like Mint. But what I did on my new laptop was that I installed PopOS 24.04 Alpha and used gnome-session ("sudo apt install gnome-session") on it, though I've switched over to COSMIC now as I'm writing apps for it and it works for my games. It'll get regular kernel+mesa updates but the base os will remain "LTS stable".
You could also go the Fedora (KDE or GNOME spins) route, it has a regular update schedule, this might be a great option for you.
I was more worried about compatibility and dependencies i might need and not know about, cachy seems to grab a lot of stuff that I wouldn't think to grab, not sure, installed cachyos and tired to open a steam windows game from my d drive noita and it worked/played fine using wine instantly. Not sure if the others would work as well as that. I think bazzite is based off fedora and also does what cachy does. I'm liking kde plasma, Im also liking a presetup version of hyprland (the 2nd most popular one, hard to remember name)