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.😄

  • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.ml
    4·
    13 hours ago

    Is the rebase feature the main thing that sets atomic desktops apart?

    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.

    I’m not too worried about having to troubleshoot. Nobara has been appealing to me because it’s developed by the Proton guy.

    Most of the kernel mods from nobara are applied on Bazzite. Bazzite and CachyOS afaik contribute to the same set of code there.

    How does an atomic distro help teach containerization and data security as compared to a traditional distro?

    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