I’ve been using Pop!_OS for a few years now, and it’s worked like a dream. Everything works out-of-the-box, and gaming on Linux has never been easier. But it almost works a little too well. Learning Linux as opposed to Windows for all my games was a fun challenge.
But, now that I’m familiar with how to set up any game that needs a little help besides Proton, I’m starting to want to delve into my OS more to see what I can customize, and I think picking a new distro with slightly different architechture will be very nice.
Don’t get me wrong, I still want something that works by itself more often than not. But I would love to have something a little more cutting-edge that gives me a little more control.
I started with Linux by installing Kubuntu, and I really miss KDE Plasma. I know Kubuntu is still on Plasma 5, and I’ve been wanting to find a distro that lets me use Plasma 6.
I’ve narrowed my choices down to three distros: Nobara, Garuda, and Bazzite.
So far, I’ve confirmed that Nobara and Garuda come with Plasma 6, but I haven’t found that information for Bazzite yet.
So, what do you think about these distros? What are the pros and cons for you?
I’m leaning the most toward Garuda - but I’m worried Arch may be TOO big of a leap. I really just learned that Fedora is not Arch-based, so I know Garuda will be a bit of the odd one out of the three.
TL;DR: Nobara, Garuda, Bazzite - which one is good and do any suck?
EDIT:
Thanks, everyone, for the insightful and helpful comments! From what everyone has said, I’ve come to find that either CachyOS or Solus will fit my needs best.
CachyOS seems optimized for gaming, while Solus’ curated rolling releases seem (to my untrained eye at least) to be somewhat of a step between the way Debian-based distros upgrade and the way Arch-based distros upgrade.
I’d love to hear people’s experiences with both of these! I think I’m going to try to dual-boot them and see what setup looks like for both.😄
Bazzite has the latest KDE, yeah, currently reading 6.4 on the latest version. Nobara broke on upgrades for me (I did nothing crazy, basic install and basic upgrade process), bazzite is rock solid and built on a good base (fedora atomic). In general, I fully recommend immutable atomic distros for noobies it all just works and it helps teach you important lessons on data security and containerization
The best thing about atomic linux images like Bazzite is if for whatever reason Bazzite stops releasing new versions you can rebase to a different “distro” and itll have all of your user data and configs intact with a single simple command. With things like Nobara or Garuda, if there is a problem you essentially have to do a clean install.
edit:
And as for Arch, Linux mint, etc., I personally find these distros and advice to be outdated. Upgrades can often break in many smaller linux distros and it is very important to have a strong and reproducible method of upgrading, especially for new users. VanillaOS and Fedora Atomic are currently the most user friendly ways to achieve flawless upgrades.
I use Garuda on my daily driver and I love it. I distro hopped for years and I’m finally home. It’s not hard like trying to do your own Arch from scratch. It’s like some super geek setup Linux for me with all the bells and whistles just the way I want it. I had to ditch the dragon theme and then it was perfect. And snapper is so well setup and integrated with Garuda, there’s rarely a case where a clean install is warranted. I highly recommend it.
I was reading into atomic distros just now. Is the rebase feature the main thing that sets atomic desktops apart?
I’m not too worried about having to troubleshoot. Nobara has been appealing to me because it’s developed by the Proton guy.
How does an atomic distro help teach containerization and data security as compared to a traditional distro?
Atomic and immutable distros essentially attempt to make each version on every computer act exactly the same to help devs with debugging. This means they shut down a lot of easy access to core system files, instead you have to use special commands to layer new changes onto your distro. These are automatically re-applied every time you upgrade, reducing the chance of breakage.
Rebasing is a fun consequence of this. Fedora Atomic images (re: things like Bazzite, Secureblue, Kinoite, etc) can be swapped out with a simple command or two. If a dev does something you don’t like, you can easily swap to a different image without having to do a full migration.
Most of the kernel mods from nobara are applied on Bazzite. Bazzite and CachyOS afaik contribute to the same set of code there.
Since you cannot easily modify system files, you need to use containers to make certain very technical (and often insecure) things work. DistroBox is the main method for this, and as a plus side, it lets you install programs with commands from any distro. I can use the AUR (an arch linux feature) on Bazzite (Fedora atomic) with DistroBox if i want, for example. There are some other things that come preinstalled on Bazzite that help with this, such as flathub and brew.sh
Correct. Atomic distros don’t apply the update, unless it is ready to be applied successfully all together, usually with an option to restore the previous state, without the need of something like btrfs snapshots.
With Nix(-OS) as an example - your bootloader entry is just a reference a giant list of what you need to get out of the Nix store, to achieve the config you want. Many of those can coexist in the same system as a result, including different versions of the same package
This setup won’t really teach you anything different in relation to containers though.
If you want to play with Atomic distros I’d recommend you do that in a virtual machine in KVM first. They are quite restricting which is good for the distro developers to make consistent releases and experiences for users, and secure, but not necessarily the best option for tech savvy users.
There are ways around the restrictions but you can reach points where the compromises you have to make are too frustrating. If you find that out late down the line after setting up your desktop it can be very annoying. Also I do use Flatpak, but it’s not the most efficient way to run software. Atomic distros have more overhead due to the need to use flatpaks or distrobox and the like to get everything you might want.
Atomic distros are a neat idea but I personally love tweaking every element of my install and optimising or customising it. So I use a rolling release distro, have my home folder on a separate partition, and back up regularly.