Hello, I have been a linux user for close to 6 years now and I have changed my distro quite a bit ( especially in first few months of starting out linux ).
I have wen’t from ubuntu, xubuntu, fedora, peppermint, arch, artix, … in first few years. After that I have settled on arch for close to 2 years. After that long time on arch I decided to try out and test interesting distro’s for at minimum 6 months every year ( and if I didn’t like them I would go to arch back ) until I found something else I could main because I have found a few issues with arch that I could accept but would become annoying from time to time.
Across the two year’s I started this yourney I have used gentoo ( used it for a year but then the lack of a proper retroarch package made me change the distro, plus the 3+ hours compile times when updating specific software ( looking at you qt-webengine and firefox ) ), then I choose to try out nixos which I used for 3/4 months before all that main maintainer debacle and splitting of the team I wen’t back to arch because I didn’t wan’t a distro I’m using falling appart on me.
And here I am now, another year is soon to start and I’m searching for another different type of a distro to try out that does something differently compared to most distros, even willing to try out nixos again if the situation has stabilized now.
My only hard requirement is that the distro need’s to be able to play games ( as in steam and gog ).
Edit: just to clarify, I’m chaning distro’s on a yearly basis for a learning experience and fun.
Void is one I’ve often thought I’d like to try if I had time to dig into it.
Hey, I used Void and had a great time with it, I loved the speed of xbps and acter I got used to it, the minimal nature of runit felt lile a breath of fresh air (which feels weird in retrospect, as I’ve never had any issues with systemd). The only problem I had (other than getting used to xbps and runit) was pipewire. As I was using a tiling WM, I couldn’t figure out what was happening and why, but I was having serious issues with pipewire and wireplumber not working, until through trial and error I finally managed to fix it but by then I was already set on moving to Fedora (again). That was in April btw.
TLDR: I’d recommend it. XBPS and Runit are new (and pretty good) and take a bit to get used to, but the thing that drove me away was pipewire issues.
Does runit have the equivalent of systemctl --user for managing per-user daemons like pipewire? I had some issues with pipewire recently and being able to journalctl --user -u pipewire and systemctl --user restart pipewire was a total godsend for me.
Another serious suggestion is OpenSUSE. They have a rolling release (like Arch does) model distribution openSUSE Tumbleweed - https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/ and another distribution more stable in a sense like Ubuntu releases versions, openSUSE Leap - https://get.opensuse.org/leap . openSUSE is seriously a good and reliable distribution that existed for long time, but is not too much well known in the entire Linux world. If I was not focused on Arch based distros recently, it would have been my choice probably.
Rocking Tumbleweed too!
- On Nvidia!
- With multiple displays at different refresh rates.
- On Wayland!
Right now they only update to the “stable” Nvidia drivers branch in the repos, so I had to install the 565.71 drivers manually via the run file from Nvidia’s website to fix an issue with variable sync. (Windows without Wayland support would strobe solid black randomly. Yikes!)
The only annoyance is having to reinstall the driver from terminal any time the kernel updates. (Protip: just make a drivers folder in your /home folder to easily get to it from the terminal.)
This is referred to as “the hard way”, but once you get it set up once it’s really just ls /drivers/nvidia, run it, and then enter -> enter -> enter -> enter -> reboot -> enjoy.
Otherwise, between Steam, Heroic Launcher (for GoG), Lutris (for EA), and Bottles (everything else / standalone games, disc games, etc), I can play pretty much anything I want! and it runs gloriously! (Be sure to get ProtonUp-Qt to get better Proton versions)
I primarily spend most of my time in Blender, but games work beautifully. Plasma 6 is just awesome as well. My win10 install is getting so dusty right now, and I actually made the jump because it kept Bluescreening on Vermintide 2, and refused to “refresh this system” because “Can’t. Sorry.”
My only thing on the wishlist is for my WMR-baser VR kit to work in Linux… maybe that’ll happen and maybe it won’t. Otherwise, I LOVE Tumbleweed.
Automatic rollbacks with Snapper and BTRFS have been wonderful too.
(If any of this sounds like rambling lingo please feel free to ask and I can clarify. ❤️)
Gentoo has binary packages now, you might want to try it again. There are retroarch packages in the overlays. Otherwise, interesting distros I know of that you haven’t listed yet are
- Void
- Guix System
- Gobo Linux (unfortunately very low on maintainers so probably not usable as a daily driver, but it is to me the most interesting of these)
you’ve mentioned this twice in the comments & now i’m curious! do you kind elaborating a bit more? i’m still getting a handle on all the diff distros & functionalities.
Gentoo is a distro that you compile all the packages ( atleast used to be that ) where you compile packages with flags that optimize those for your exact cpu.
Also allows you to strip out features from packages while compiling like X11/wayland uf you don’t use either.
This can help a lot in general performance of your system.
For a Linux distro, try Slackware or one of the immutable ones. For not a Linux distro, try one of the BSDs.
