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.😄
I would guess jumping from PopOS to Bazzite would be a challange becaue of it is immutable base. It is supposedly less prone to brekage, but certain guides won’t work on them.
I think Nobara (or Fedora KDE) will work for you to try. I would avoid Garuda. It has many GUI for helping new user but if learning is your purpose, that just gets in the way. I would suggest Endeavor OS for Arch-based distro.
This is a left field suggestion: Try Solus [email protected] , we have a pretty good KDE edition. :)
Cheers!
As a tinkering old nerd who mainly runs Garuda these days, I would throw in that the added GUI tools don’t have to be in the way. It is Arch under the hood, and you can totally ignore Garuda’s add-ons and just proceed like you would on vanilla Arch whenever you feel like it.
Best of both worlds, really. The GUI tools are still there whenever you do want to use them, but it’s also just Arch. I like MX Linux for similar reasons, as someone who started out on Debian back in the day. Useful for solving problems in both cases, too.
True, I just like start minimal and add on top of that. Truth be told, my experience with Garuda is minimal.
Thank you for that point about Bazzite. I was worried about having locked-down system files, because I’m really not at a place where I’m breaking my distro all the time.
I’ve been eyeing CachyOS since another user suggested it. Love the idea of rolling releases, so Solus seems cool too! What sets ya’ll apart from the other distros that have been discussed?
We have pretty easy to use homegrown package manager (eopkg). We also have our own software center, though it is in the process of being replaced by Gnome Software and KDE Discover. You can install software from Solus repository or Flathub via those software center. We adopt what we called “curated-rolling” release, we only do software update on Friday. We also ensure that packages from our repositrory can be run OOTB without user configuration, using principle what is called “stateless”. You can find out more about Solus on the website, help center, and forum.