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.

    • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
      51·
      5 days ago

      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.

  • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world
    6·
    4 days ago

    Nix is great, I went from arch to nix and never went back. All the customization, none of the risk. You break your rig you roll back to its previous state

    • CronyAkatsuki@lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz
      OP
      2·
      4 days ago

      Agree, might go back to it, but when that came up at the beggining of this year ( or was it last ? ) about mainter’s made me leave it until the situation settled down cause I didn’t wanna use a distro in an unstable maintenanve state.

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    12·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
      3·
      5 days ago

      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. ❤️)

    • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      5 days ago

      I used Tumbleweed for a long time as a daily driver and then as my admin workstation. Worked really well, GUI admin panels are nice, and I didnt find anything too difficult.

  • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
    13·
    5 days ago

    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)
      • [R3D4CT3D]English
        3·
        5 days ago

        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.

        • CronyAkatsuki@lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz
          OP
          4·
          5 days ago

          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.

          • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
            5·
            5 days ago

            You can use binary packages for x86_64-v3 and it will already use a lot more modern CPU instructions, and it will still compile single packages from source if you change the USE flags to something the binhost doesn’t have.

            It certainly doesn’t “defeat the whole purpose of using Gentoo”.

  • Notamoosen@lemmy.zip
    4·
    4 days ago

    If you’re looking for a challenge you could try FreeBSD. While not Linux it’s still unix like and can provide a great learning experience. I believe they have retroarch in their packages, and I’ve seen videos of people getting Steam working. They provide excellent documentation on their OS as a whole.

  • Kory@lemmy.ml
    12·
    5 days ago

    I’d suggest OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and one of the UBlue images - maybe Bazzite, since you mentioned gaming. But Steam and GOG run on all of those.

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
    11·
    5 days ago

    Try PikaOS.

    It’s Debian for gaming. They use the CachyOS kernel (rebranded), BTRFS, the Debian Sid base, and they do the package optimization thing that Cachy does. They also use a lot of the same UI tooling from Nobara, like the welcome screen and icons, and the update GUI is based on but an improvement over the one from Nobara. There’s also the same Kernel Manager and Scheduler selector as what you’d find in Cachy.

    Like Arch, it’s a rolling update distro, and they have some kind of automated process that builds/optimizes new packages every day.

    It’s admirable what they’re trying to do, and I’m currently considering making a bare-metal switch.

    • node815@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Sadly, it’s for Haswell and higher, I’m on an older Sandy Lake CPU so could not get it to boot and then I saw in their Wiki about the requirements. Yeah, it’s an old PC. (~14 yrs old and as temperamental as a teenager!) :)

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
        1·
        4 days ago

        Bummer! It’s kinda neat to use, but yeah, they dropped older hardware support (though it’s still fairly young, so maybe it will be a thing in the future).

    • lps@lemmy.ml
      2·
      5 days ago

      PikaOS looks cool, never heard of it, but it had me a Debian optimized hardware and software support:). What’s the hyprland version?

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
        1·
        5 days ago

        Not sure, but it’s supposed to be near-bleeding edge for everything. I couldn’t get the Hyprland version to boot in a VM, so I can’t be sure

  • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
    10·
    5 days ago

    Here’s a cool idea: uBlue and specifically Bazzite. And should it not be entirely to your liking, you can always build a custom ublue image!

  • OhYeah@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    5·
    5 days ago

    Current nixos user and it seems to me to have stabilized a good bit. I know that the nixos foundation held their first elections for the steering community. Also they recently released their new stable 24.11 version that seemed to go smoothly.

    It is not back to where it was in terms of dev trust but there is good progress, and my software still gets updated so I have stuck with it

  • jellyfish@beehaw.org
    8·
    5 days ago

    If you’re looking for a new daily driver, look at Fedora Silverblue. I also started on arch, and have been in nix for the last two years, and I’m planning to switch to Silverblue in the next year

  • warmaster@lemmy.world
    4·
    5 days ago

    I went through a similar path to yours, and settled on Bazzite. If gaming is not your main thing, you might want to check out the ublue project to learn about the other spins

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    5·
    5 days ago

    https://nyarchlinux.moe/

    Nyarch Linux

    The perfect linux distribution for degenerated weebs.

    It’s based on Arch, therefore has my approval. I don’t use it, just saw it in some Linux related comment mentioned recently (today in fact).

    I personally use EndeavourOS - https://endeavouros.com/ , which is based on Arch and operates close to Archlinux, but has some automated stuff going on that helps people like me. Its so close to Arch, that I ask myself why I’m not switching to it entirely. Simple answer is: Don’t touch a running system.