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.
Try Bedrock Linux and tell us all about it.
Try YiffOS
I don’t know if it is available yet, but KDE Linux sounds pretty cool. It’s kinda the same “Arch for everyone” take on Arch that Valve has going on with SteamOS, but with some pretty fancy stuff planned.
If you want to learn about a couple of cool customisations, you could also take a look at Garuda Linux, specifically the Dragonized Gaming Edition (aka Bloaty McBloatface Edition) or XeroLinux (although I don’t know if that’s maintained atm, I think the dev had to flew from a war in the middle east)
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.
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.
