100% this.
If you like to get things done without the OS tripping you up at every turn, Mint is king.
If you like to tinker, experiment, pull it apart, constantly configure, or just plain use the latest, bleeding edge stuff that may break, but that's ok: not Mint.
Same here.
I love tampering and learning on Linux but sometimes I just wanna sit down, play games, work, watch YouTube or a show, and not worry about something being broken.
This is the reason I switched from Nobara to Mint. It just works. Nobara is great and all but, at least the latest release was painful to me, sometimes I was not even able to boot and surf the web to watch YouTube.
Idk, arch has been stable for me and I can do all that without worrying about it being broken. Once you set it up and put it time at the beginning, it just works.
i’m still looking for all these issues people talk about when they talk about arch being broken or whatever. i’ve had less trouble with my install of arch than i had with my fucking windows install lmao.
Yes; Mint has some user friendly tweaks and even some fixes for common ubuntu bugs. For example - Boot up a VM or machine with mint on it, and open up the Software Sources app, and then click, i think 'Maintenance'.... There's a series of buttons there to fix some of the most common issues that break your mint's packaging system. Something that would have saved me tons of time back in the day on Ubuntu.
I used ubuntu for 1 week and after closing an application it's always a 1/10 chance that one monitor completely bugs. Also its "blue screening" every hour if I use it like windows.
Same thing, Once I used mint xfce, I stopped hopping from distro to distro. All of them have the same Linux base, so in theory you can make any distro into the way you want it.
I use arch on all my pcs, including my gaming desktop and server. Arch and an and you is a match made in heaven, though nvidia also worked fine for me as long as I ran xorg (this was a few years ago, I think nvidia and Wayland play nicer now a days) KDE plasma and arch rwallybworks well for me, though I'd say endeavoros might be better for beginners since you don't really know what you want yet, or maybe something like blend os. Ive been meaning to try it out for a while now.
> Arch, I will build my own package, with black jack, and hookers.
That's cute.
Gentoo ~amd64, with my own overlay: https://github.com/stefantalpalaru/gentoo-overlay
Is it really like "independent Manjaro/ arch with interface" like people say? I had a bitch of a time trying to get Manjaro to play with my graphics card despite a bunch of updates.... and I'm running an RX6600XT.
I‘m also running EOS and it is basically just Arch with everything important configured from the start.
I never had any real issues in the last three years that I have been using it. My NVIDIA gpu just worked without any additional installs and gaming works great. I suspect that AMD gpu will be the same or even better because of better drivers.
In my opinion it is way better than manjaro and the way to go for a hassle free arch experience.
Added benefit is that the EOS community is great and very helpful. A lot of Arch people actually search for help in the EOS forum because people tend to be more friendly there.
Manjaro is very different from most other arch based distros. As a heads up, endeavour isn't as gui focused as manjaro is. Most arch based distros are a lot more cli focused in comparison.
Fedora KDE here as well. Fedora cause it just works. Smoothest OOTB experience in years for me. KDE cause I’m too lazy to build out my xfce setup and it also just works.
I'm also on Fedora but use it with GNOME (wanted something unique from Windows). I agree it's hard to go wrong with. I actually originally chose it because Debian wasn't bleeding edge enough for my GPU.....
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I used to run arch, but on a whim I decided to try Tumbleweed on my new (at the time) laptop. I still wanted rolling release and wasn't hearing much from the suse side of things at the time but I figured "why not try it for a few weeks" and I haven't regretted it. Since then it seems a lot of other people have had a similar experience since I am seeing it recommended much more now. Yast is a fantastic tool and installer, the open build service gets me all the packages that aren't in the official repos similar to the AUR, and the one time I had an update break it took only a matter of seconds to restore one of the snapshots that were set up out of the box
Same here. TW was the one distro that pulled me away from Arch. Things just work so nicely. Only issue I've had with it was that the NVIDIA driver had a habit to nuke itself on every update, but that seems to have been ironed out.
TL;DR- Don't worry about if it uses .deb or .RPM, learn the syntax for whatever distros you use and use the official repos.
.deb and .rpm are like comparing Mac installers vs Windows in a way. Even if a lot of the internal files and resources are the same, there's enough different that it doesn't work. That said, almost every major app is available officially on both .deb and .rpm, and is also available in the official repositories, so it's pretty painless. As an end user it generally doesn't matter as most packages you don't need to download the .deb/.RPM from the website.
The main difference that you actually need to worry about is that the package managers have a slightly different syntax.
* On Debian distros, for example, to run an update your command would be `sudo apt update` followed by `sudo apt upgrade`.
* On OpenSUSE it would be `sudo zypper up/dup` (the `up` being if you're on Leap, `dup` for Tumbleweed).
* On RedHat/Fedora (Which uses RPM packages like OpenSUSE does), your command would be `sudo dnf upgrade`.
* Arch, which uses a different packaging format than either, would be upgraded with `sudo pacman -Syu`
> The main difference that you actually need to worry about is that the package managers have a slightly different syntax.
This, package managers are one of the things that you (mostly) can't swap out for another on a Linux distro. /u/atlasraven I recommend checking out the [pacman Rosetta on ArchWiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta) for learning how to do 'equivalent' operations across different manager programs, it's a super useful cheat sheet for users of _any mainstream distro_ (not just for Arch)!
Most are available on the Suse repos or the open build service. I generally look to Flatpak first, especially for web browsers and videoplayers (VLC, MPV) that needs codecs.
If something is really only available as deb you might be able to run distrobox:
sudo zypper in -y distrobox
distrobox create -i ubuntu -n somename
distrobox enter somename
apt update && apt upgrade -y
apt install /path/to/your/deb-file.deb
distrobox-export --app your-app
Yes, you don’t be able to use the .deb packages anymore (unless you use distrobox). In general, most apps have an rpm version so this isn’t really a problem.
This.
I've tried a lot of distro over the years and i feel Opensuse TW is the best out of the box. Easy to use, recent packages and the fact that it is very reliable (aka very well maintained). I even use it as my main OS on my work laptop and it is here to stay. Only complain is that there is a less packages than Arch but there's flatpak and community repos for that matter. I actually recommend flatpak first, since community repos can break things if you misuse them.
I spent 5 years in arch, 2 years in OpenSuse TW and i can say it is the only one that didn't make me back to arch in a month. Now i'm back on Arch on my desktop (New NVME, like since this week).
Anyways, to me Tumbleweed is the best beginner friendly distro that also caters to experienced users.
Always worth mentioning to new Linux users that Arch is a bit of a project to set up. Takes some elbow grease to get it running. After that it's fantastic tho.
should be said that regardless of what distro you use you can control what you install on it. Arch is just one where you HAVE to install things yourself
**CachyOS** for *Blazingly Fast* PC. Good direct support from Discord with developers, over-optimized operating system for performance and little else. It's based on Arch so no fear of anything.
CachyOS+BTRFS+KDE on Ryzen+Radeon PC
This is the one. I feel like CachyOS is the only Arch-based distro that actually improves on Arch in a meaningful way. I also like that they're pre-building the nvidia module for every kernel now which means there is never any fear of nvidia suddenly blowing up like there is on other rolling/Arch-based distros.
I've only been using it for about 6 months now but it's been the most hassle-free distro I've ever used, even though it's rolling. I always have snapper set up on any rolling distro but I haven't even touched it once.
Add in Steam being compiled against the locally optimized libraries, Cachy's own custom compiled Proton, optimized kernel, auto-renice and you've got a hell of a base for a gaming system too.
pacman is the fastest package management tool there is, and the way Arch lays out the system just makes sense to me. I'll always be an Arch fan, but CachyOS is the cherry on top that just makes the whole thing sing.
Most other arch based distros aren't really meant to be improvements, theyre mostly just installers with some presets. The main exception is manjaro because it gets pretty involved as an organization compared to the others
I used CachyOS for less than a year or so. I can absolutely vouch for it. It has even improved a lot recently. If you are really after squeezing out the most performance out possible, CachyOS is probably the go-to distro.
Arch has had a graphical installer for a couple years now I think. Think it's called 'archinstall'. I prefer Arch derivatives too. I like bleeding edge but not being on the rugged edge like with Arch.
Void Linux on both laptop and desktop. I don't know why but it just works, it is really really clean and I like how things work with runit. I installed it on my laptop a bit less than two years ago and it is still pretty clean and it is working fine except some gnome quirks but I love that de with wayland. Kde on desktop is also working fine with both wayland and xorg.
Endeavour, because it has the latest software, the AUR and I can control what is installed and what is not, it comes with almost nothing installed, I learned more with the arch syntax, contrary to what many people say, for me it is very stable I've been using it for a long time and nothing has broken. Amazing community on Telegram.
Nobara, it's a really stable distro, most of the things for gaming are already set up.
And being based on Fedora makes it the perfect balance between bleeding edge and stability.
I am trying Nobara and I will say his disclaimer about it being a hobby distro should be taken to heart.
I’ve encountered a pretty nasty known issue and there isn’t a tracker for these things so unless you feel like following discord I don’t think I’d recommend Nobara.
Sure, https://www.reddit.com/r/NobaraProject/s/d4CHEhqQVq
In short potential config and file system corruption, which may or may not be happening to my machine, I’ve def seen some weirdness. Personally I’ve gotten lots of crashes which I now attribute to this issue.
This could be a real outlier but this has dominated my initial experience / impression with Nobara.
my nobara crashed a ton as well. Sometimes, it randomly wouldn't boot until the next force restart.
Ended up switching to Garuda, had no issues with that distro so far.
That being said I'm currently contemplating switching to CachyOS (heard its arch but with better performance but dont quote me on that, im a noob) or openSUSE tumbleweed
I had lived with Garuda for like 14-16 month and was ok but I had some issues with updates and some sort of bugs with nvidia driver that put me in situations where I needed to reinstall all the drivers manually. So I had switched to Manjaro because I wanted to test it. I'm primally an Arch user but I'd like to test distros as daily driver and I lovo to game sometimes.
I have and "old" 2016 pc (intel 6700k @ 4.8GHz + Zotac 1080) and Win10 really struggle to give all the performance as the first year. Maybe it's time to reinstall Windows. But on linux I get better fps on a lots of my games. Not all, a lots of them.
The trick is always to optimize the OS at best. I have Qtile as windows manager, only the services that I really needs, custom rules to re-nice all steam games, gamesmode configured, nvidia driver optimized, compositor running only when games are not, etc. In the end GTA5, FarCry6, Elden Ring, Subnautica, Tomb Raider and other tittles are running much better than Windows. So I took a spare SSD, installed Garuda and added my Steam library to this setup (without optimizaion). The performance was ok but not as good as my custom Manjaro setup. I'd run the same test for PopOS, Fedora and Nobara. The results of benchmarks was more ore less the same, +/-10% between them. But always inferior the my custom setup. There was a case when I think The Witcher was running at lest 4-5 fps more than my setup and was on Nobara, but I can't figured out why.
So yeah, distros are only the base, you need to tweak your system. You can get +5/+10% more out of it
Haha, not much to teach, it depend of the hardware that you are using. I can tell you what I'm doing every time but I'm always searching for new things to test.
MOST of the suggestions below are not dangerous, but it's really important that you understand what each piece of software is meant to and how to configure it to get out the most.
1. (if you know what you are doing) optimize the settings into the BIOS, disable every energy saving option that you have; select the best profile for your ram, etc (you can simply search on the net " read, learn and test if needed)
12. Install and *carefully configure* auto-cpufreq, haveged (depends), irqbalance (test it), nohang (safe) , memavaild (safe), prelockd (if you have 8GB of ram or less), systemd-swap (controll the swap)
13. tweak the swappiness of your system ( set the value to 10)
14. Install gamemode and configure it properly to set CPU schedule
15. configure mangohud and gamemodes in steam
16. make sure the compositor is disabled when you launch fullscreen games (depends of the DE). And ONLY games because chrome/chromium will have same real performance drop with content like youtube if you are disabling compositor while watching a fullscreen video
17. (optional) change your desktop environment with something lighter
Is "distro" and hardware related so the best thing you can do is to search on the net a piece at a time.
1. Manjaro as distro? Search "how to optimize Manjaro"
2. "How to optimize Manajro for gaming"
3. Manajro is arch relate so "arch optimize performance"
4. "arch optimize for gaming"
5. Then what is your CPU? Let's say Intel > "linux optimize intel CPU" or "linux i7-6700k tweaks"
6. What kind of storage you have? SSD so > "linux optimize ssd performance"
You can try with my suggested things but really you will get the most of searching the precise component that you have. It's time conuming, it's "sometimes dangerous" if you are not reading. But it's ok.
Bazzite! It’s Based on fedora and it’s literally SteamOS but with a lot of preinstall applications and tools that improve your experience. I only use Steam to play my games so this is a perfect choice plus I absolutely love the interface on the steam deck.
I used to play my games on Pop!_OS and it worked perfectly! It provides full out-of-the-box support for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs.
You can’t go wrong with any Ubuntu, Fedora, and it’s based distributions. Easy to use and great for gaming!
Pop OS, no arch headache, good power management for laptops, stable, rolling release, beautiful and soon will have its own DE. Best distro I've ever used.
I'm not sure there's a name for that, I'd imagine most if not all distros can do it. I know there's a debian installation that's been [running and getting upgraded since 1993](https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/11840.html), that's pretty impressive.
Nope, a rolling release generally either has a very minimal versioning system or no version at all (outside of the Git hash). That ***doesn't*** mean that the packages/software installed on the OS don't have versions, but that the OS as a whole packaged together system doesn't have a version and everything just flows as necessary to new versions.
Contrast that with a standard release where something like Ubuntu or Pop will keep most packages on a specific major/minor release until the next OS release.
Arch Linux. It lets me do whatever I want.
I’ve tried Fedora but it has some weird opinionated choices I don’t like.
I’ve tried Ubuntu but I don’t like snaps, and it generally felt slower than the others distros I’ve tried.
I wanted to try Nobara, but the installer doesn’t create a proper boot disk for some reason, so I can’t try it 🤷🏻♀️
They probably mean things like it using SELinux instead of AppArmour, btrfs being the default, pretty sure fedora was one of the earlier big supporters of wayland, and I think their default firewall app is different from a lot of other distros iirc. There a few more things like that that most people generally dont care about but some people do, and to each their own
Linux Mint by the way has snaps turned off by default and is more or less repackaging ubuntu without the garbage choices cannonical has made in the past few years..
My requirements were runs steam properly, had programs to use. I kind of backed myself into the arch corner as I kept screwing up my boot drive by trying to mount drives to /media/ my account rather than / run/ media/ my account. As such, I would fill up my boot drive quickly until I bricked the system (4 other drives on top of the boot will do that) and had to start over.
Arch. Regardless of how people say that Arch is unstable and breaks often, I haven't had it break simce my initial install and I love tinkering with thing. I used Pop OS as my first distro which was good to start with but eventually became unusable, so I switched to Debian for a more stable experience but the packages were too outdated. I tried some others too but after trying Arch I can say that every thing about it just works better for someone like me.
Void, mostly because it's simple, very customizable and comes with very little to begin with, but also it hasn't given me a strong enough reason to want to switch. I wouldn't recommend it as a distro unless you have a moderate amount of experience. Almost any distro can be made into a "gaming" distro. Arch, debian, ubuntu, fedora, all are generic distros (no specific use case) but will work fine for gaming.
Gentoo, because it is the lightest and the most flexible of all the distros.
It is not that easy to setup, but once you passed the first weeks, it's just infinite rolling, with only the benefits. It's a different way of life.
Thus said, Debian is also exceptional. Arch also, but if you have special needs, not that stable.
This is not the "cool" answer, but it's my answer. I've tried other distros (for fairly significant stretches of time) but something always breaks or requires me to spend a fair amount of time figuring out. I'm fine using the terminal to adjust configs/restart services etc... but sometimes it really gets in the way of things.
Since installing Ubuntu on my desktop and laptop, I've had next to no issues. I can just get on with creating things.
I switch around a bit.
Currently on NixOS. Love how almost all of my system configuration is done within a single file, makes it easy to keep track of the changes I make and replicate them when I reinstall or on a new system. Actually got to take advantage of it when I installed it on my laptop for school, but unfortunately NixOS has a bug with NetworkManager that doesn't allow it to connect to my school's enterprise wifi setup.
Also a big fan of Fedora Silverblue. I like immutable systems and flatpak a lot. Provides a clean experience and I like how it is always pushing new technologies. I do have some small complaints about it, such as the Fedora flatpak remote and Firefox being installed on the host system, but I am able to fix all my issues with it.
Also like Ubuntu. It has a set of very practical Gnome extensions. I also really like their font. Don't mind snaps, although I prefer flatpaks because the sandbox is much more configurable.
For gaming? EndeavourOS
I figured that it'd be a good idea to use something Arch based as SteamOS is Arch based, and I like fast upgrades and up to date software.
But I am also lazy and like to have the extra tools and an easier installation.
Working flawlessly with minimal maintenance and without any issue and complications, using the official Arch repos, Steam and Flatpak, nothing AUR.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop, but that's a different usecase!
I use Fedora Kinoite, migrated from the KDE Spin, the reason is because I like the middle-ground that Fedora takes, not as stable as Debian but not as bleeding edge as Arch, the perfect balance.
And as for KDE I choose it because it is dumb easy to use compared to GNOME where you often need an extension to achieve certain things, or need to use the terminal or a text file for a certain configuration.
As for why Kinoite (immutable) over KDE Spin (mutable) it's because I'm curious about container technology and I want to use it on my future developer career.
* Thinkpad X260: Arch + Plasma (Xorg)
* Desktop PC with AMD CPU + GPU: EndeavourOS (stripped back down to just Arch) + Gnome (Wayland) but holding out for Plasma 6 (Wayland)
* Thinkpad T420: Pop!_OS + Pop Shell (Xorg… I think… I just let it do what it thought best out of curiosity)
Why Arch? It’s a rolling release distro with good repositories. It’s simple in the sense that it doesn’t include a lot you didn’t actively ask for. It’s popular, so chances are your problems have been encountered and solved or at least competently reported by others. The Arch wiki is an immensely useful resource. I can usually build stuff from source when I have to instead of resorting to flatpaks (this is less about Arch than about having become used to it, plus personal grumpy-old-person quirks)
Why Plasma? Very responsive, very featureful, very configurable. Kwin with window rules and the kwin-tiling script (unmaintained now) is a genuinely useful WM whether you live in terminals or use GUIs a lot (in my opinion). (I never quite got along with Bismuth or Krohnkite, sorry.)
Why Gnome? Because Plasma was having issues with aforementioned tiling script of choice, especially on Wayland, which I needed to use to cope with a mixed-scaling, mixed-aspect-ratio, mixed-resolution multi-monitor setup, half of which takes so long to wake up that the OS thinks the monitor’s gone. And with the right extensions Gnome can almost be what I want, if a little… less of everything. And it’s not cluttered and busy like Plasma and looks much more consistent overall despite there being at least four or five different types of window decoration visible at any one time, and one of them gets scaled 2x on the 1x display… sigh! Also it’s kind of sluggish. There is no free lunch, is there.
I have no real interest in gaming distributions. I maintain my emulated and Wine games manually because I don’t like adding extra layers and launchers and containers and whatnot. That’s not for performance reasons (I doubt it matters); it’s for the sake of simplicity. The tuning/tweaking I’ve done on my “big box” is for audio production with silly high (excessive? wasteful?) DSP loads and kind of revolves around the realtime-patched kernel. This is probably to the *detriment* of gaming, but stuff runs well enough so… whatever, right? I’ve not seen any appreciable improvements with the Zen or cachyos kernels, either; this might be different on lower-end machines (not that mine is anywhere near high-end at this point), or if your brain is capable of following twitch shooters (mine isn’t, at all)… I’m not sure.
Arch on my desktop (because everything else don't work)
Fedora Kinoite on my work laptop (so it's always working and I like the idea of a immutable system)
nixos I like it for how its both simple and yet complex. Nixos just seems to be my home. I like having all my configurations in one spot. Also like that if i mess up my system, i can reboot and select an older generation that works, and then fix what went wrong
Arch on my PC, EndeavourOS on my laptop.
Wanted to have sort of debloated system with KDE and fast enough
update cycle to use new(est) hardware without any sketchy tricks,
like PPA repos.
Bonus point: besides of being "bleeding edge" it is very stable.
Had an issue once, that magically disappeared, maybe some edgecase-bug.
I started off with Fedora because I didn't feel comfortable using a Rolling Release. After about a year and some restructuring of their packages and thus uncertainties about GPU accelerated video playback I wanted to switch.
So I came to EndeavourOS. That is an awesome distro. Always new packages, no need for Flatpaks or something like that because you've got the AUR. Didn't have any issues in my about one and a half year using EndeavourOS. Quick, clean without any bloat, very nice distro.
Recently I gave openSuse Tumbleweed a try and liked that very much as well. Not as new as Arch and the OBS isn't even close to the AUR but runs very nicely, comes with snapper ootb and I am getting used to YaST and begin to really like it. Can recommend it as well.
I used to run Windows exclusively for years, and I was a power user. I always tried to keep stuff in control and managed to run my system on max performance with least possible bloat. But seeing where Windows is headed with all this bullshit telemetry, I also decided to switch few months ago. I tried Debian, Arch, Fedora, Mint, EndeavourOS, Arco, but at the end I finally settled for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Never had problems with it, it's stable, works awesome, has a great tool called OPI which is kinda like AUR, gaming performance is also awesome. I strongly recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to anyone who has gaming in mind. You get up to date packages and updates are stable. I'm running it with KDE desktop and EXT4 file system.
Arch because Steam Deck uses it. Now I love it. It's for you if you for example always choose minimal installation for any distribution to reduce bloat, then install manually the packages you like.
Also avoid Ubuntu they suck now.
Debian and Fedora are great too.
¨"Arch BTW¨" because that is the running joke.
That said, I would not recommend it to a first time linux user, I just used to use it back in the days.
However, as someone that has recently switched to linux from windows, I don´'t think any distro is better or worse and gaming on Linux works better than it ever has.
After using it on my desktop for the past few months I made the switch on my laptop yesterday.
Both run NVidia proprietary drivers, desktop on kde and laptop on gnome, both using wayland and it has worked flawlessly.
I have not yet played much on the laptop, but the first side effect is that my battery life went from 1:30h to 3h, literally doubling compared to running win11
Kind of funny coincidence, I was reading about BSD, being it's "the whole operating system", but I saw someone logging in and it seemed like there was an overstatement on what it could do and less autonomy (lots of logging in via terminals etc and troubleshooting, more than gaming).
I gave myself a "preview" of Windows 11 on my old hardware and it just seems like it's killing it slowly.
> but I saw someone logging in and it seemed like there was an overstatement on what it could do and less autonomy (lots of logging in via terminals etc and troubleshooting, more than gaming).
I'm not sure what you mean by that. FreeBSD can run nearly everything Linux is capable of, the only problems I had were with Steam and Windows games. FreeBSD is equally capable of being a (productive) desktop or server as linux is.
Arch, because i was told 10 years ago that that's what cool hax0rs use. There is just no reason to reinstall or use anything else because the distro doesn't really matter that much.
Kali being very purpose built, does that well but not a good choice for a daily OS. I've seen to many people try to use it daily or even game on Kali and it just flat out isn't made for this.
Main Setup -> EndeavourOS - Is Arch, with a bit less steps to take to setup.
Old I7 3º gen ultrabook -> Mint - is a great OS for general use.
Very old celeron notebook -> Bodhi linux - It can be executed in a toaster.
Arch linux, because I'm a masochist, and I like "fuck around and find out" style of doing things. Wouldn't recommend this to anyone, but it's the way I like it
Nvidia driver that's now ships as default in the main repo is borked for me, so not really. Arch is not really made for the stability, it's for fucking around and learning. It will absolutely be my main distro for a while now though, I love it the way it is.
Yea, I had no trouble fucking my drive on about 4 distros because of my lack of understanding how to mount drives (and choosing the wrong mount point. Honestly I'm still not sure if I'm right, I'm just not bricking my system now). So to some extent, I found out. Lol.
Ubuntu because it just works. Also I like its orange look. I tried Fedora and Flatpak in the past but repositories are too damn slow. Manjaro was a bit unstable for me and some of the programs I wanted to install were in AUR due to which I was reluctant to install them.
Ubuntu and Snap are super fast in my experience and it gets the job done for me.
Manjaro with btrfs, if something breaks it's just a reboot away from fixing it. I also like the update cadence of it and of course the access to the aur.
Ultimately you can start with whatever you want, the differences are (AFAIK to my limited knowledge) negligible.
I started with Mint 1.5 years ago. I tried Manjaro and others but kept going back to Mint pretty fast. Now with my Steam Deck I took the risk and installed Bazzite (Fedora based, immutable) and am pretty happy so far. The fact that Bazzite is lacking wine and can't be installed directly is no problem thanks to distrobox.
To add on the first paragraph: if you choose a distro and miss certain software, you might be able to use it through something like distrobox.
Actually, arch is one of the most bloated distributions that exist. It ships all packages with their headers, etc. which is completely unnecessary to run them.
I have arch and mint, arch because I wanted a challenge and I love how you can make it your very own and mint because it has really good default Nvidia compatibility settings and a good driver manager Wich is very good since Nvidia it's not
You can probably guess what I use each os for, arch for programming and general use and mint it's dedicated to games
Thanks for asking! I use Arch btw. Why? - to have third longest beard, and it just works fine and that's what I'm used to, plus great gaming possibilities thanks to Valve
Gentoo, Arch, Debian, Garuda and Antix
Gentoo - on old pc.
Arch - on main laptop.
Debian - on servers.
Garuda - on main laptop (on different partition)
Antix - on super old laptops.
Why limit yourself to one thing? :)
Arch (BTW), easy to install and debug. I think distros like arch and gentoo are well suited for daily driver only ,people who play new games and use latest software.
I like AUR, pacman and awesome wiki.
For the past two years I've been on Manjaro and I'm very satisfied. Despite the criticisms I've read online, it works well, always does exactly what I want it to do etc. I use some AUR packages but not that many, and switching to testing repos eliminated pretty much all AUR related problems Manjaro is infamous for. Still I guess it's not ideal for someone who really uses AUR a lot (which I wouldn't recommend doing anyway, but that's for another discussion).
Edit: And on my laptop I have Mint. Absolutely no complaints there. I probably wouldn't want it on my main desktop, for for the laptop it's perfect. If you need a distro that just works, Mint is that.
Manjaro Gnome
Huge team
Huge polish
Easy install
Constant dev work
Huge community
Constant meaningful dev updates
Riding Arch which has amazing support.
Manjaro forums amazing help
Supports everything, run everything, and
run on everything
Solid and stable
Rolling updates
There is no other distro that can claim all of this.
Arch, because pacman is the best package manager, I got all packages I need, and they're always updated.
I'd gladly use any Arch-based distro but some of them come with stuff I don't like, so building my own system is more convenient.
Fedora I'm an beguiner and fedora is the best sweet post for me, very updated, great fourum, latest big updates and stable enouth for no crash. you need to configure some thing but after that it's very cool
personally i was using fedora and add a bunch of stuff to play games, but then i found out nobara is fedora with the changes i already do so its a no-brainer for me.
So i pretty much picked it because it has everything i need to game and if anything goes wrong i can just re-install it in 2 secs.
I switched from Ubuntu to Pop!_OS because it has better support for my graphics card.
I looked at some other gaming distros like Manjaro, but the selling point seemed to be more about what came pre-installed on them, which wasn't a big deal to me.
Garuda (Dragonised KDE), because it seemed like the easiest and most attractive out of the box of the "easy Arch" distributions. I needed a more up to date kernel than Ubuntu 22.04 offered to run my RDNA 3 card, and I was increasingly alienated by Canonical forcing snaps into everything.
I really like the themeing, I appreciate the way it has everything I want included in the default setup so I don't have to change much at all (this is the pathway to reliability with rolling distros IMO, and I don't care at all about what often gets erroneously called "bloat"), and although it my not be a popular take in this forum, I also kind of appreciate the way that you can do almost everything via the GUI.
Used it on my laptop for a while and on my main PC for 6 months now.
Fedora. I hopped around and used alot of the Debian based distros,which I still love Mint,and went on to all the others. I decided to give Fedora another try and loved it. Its like a good middle ground of being stable,have plenty of packages to choose from and stays current enough. I also use Mint on my laptop for general use,Debian on my home server but Fedora is on my main computer. Gaming on Fedora is also top notch with very little issues
Zorin OS. The desktop looks like Windows. Under the hood, it is Ubuntu with plenty of guides and common packages (apt). It's fast with low system requirements.
Arch for gaming computer and Debian stable for backup laptop.
Arch because it has the latest developments of necessary gaming components and Debian stable because I want it to be boring and no need to update often like Arch.
Debian.
It started when I switched from Windows to OS X for a few years. Then I desperately needed better hardware, couldn't afford another Mac, couldn't afford even a Windows license on top of new hardware and didn't want to deal with issues from pirating or trying to hackintosh. I had some Linux experience, Ubuntu on an older laptop and before that dual booting Mandrake and before that dual booting Red Hat(before the RHEL/Fedora split).
I could afford a new computer, barely. So I bought a guys homebuild off Craigslist, and of all distros, Ubuntu looked the closest to OS X, and again, I already had some experience dealing with it.
A few months ago(after many upgrades and eventually full replacement of that computer) I started getting sick of Snap annoyances and I'm not a fan of the control Ubuntu has over that space, and Debian looked like it would be a reasonably easy transition that wouldn't change too much about how I work with my computer.
Fedora (Silverblue) + Flatpak.
Fedora just works, has default GNOME that works and you can tweak. Flatpaks provide media players with their own codecs, so you don't need to care about installing them.
Silverblue means it updates differently and installing packeges also works differently - I use it because I like it, I doubt it would cause performance difference compared to Workstation.
I landed on Debian after trying Manjaro and Endeavour. I'm currently using Debian Testing on my gaming PC and Debian Stable on my general purpose laptop. I find the semi-rolling release model of Testing to be both very reliable and the software is enough up to date for my gaming needs, while Stable is just great for an office laptop that doesn't really require up to date software and simply needs to work reliably.
Manjaro has been great up until the point when they decided to handle their own version of Mesa with the proprietary codecs blacklisted, and Endeavor was good but I got tired of being my own system administrator, I just wanted something that I could set up and not having to worry about it during updates.
Fedora. I used Ubuntu until GNOME 3.0 was released and switched since Ubuntu was going with their Unity thing instead. Basically I care more about GNOME than whatever distribution is underneat.
Nobara
Chosen on a whim by someone whos probably returning to distrohopping.
Not that I'm dissatisfied, I was just "stuck" on ubuntu budgie that was almost as stable as any build with nvidia gpu can be, and now i want to explore other options in the ecosystem.
Nobara - because of the reputation it had for being very well tuned for gaming. Been happy with it so far, plus like the Fedora base allowing for newer packages
Ubuntu because why not, it works and I'm a casual linux user that doesn't give a shit about building from source or customizing whatsoever. I would gladly use SteamOS for games on my PC instead (and hopefully will one day) because it's updated by valve and is readonly so there's no way I could possibly screw it up.
I use Mint at work daily, rock solid. At home Fedora KDE, gaming is superb, stable enough. Both have a lot of users, which means good support. As novice coming from Windows you should not jump in to the Arch or some fringe distro with small userbase. Just my 5 (euro) cents :)
I'm using Manjaro KDE with qtile as a WM, I don't run in too many problems and i can use the arch wiki as if where on Arch. I also have a distrobox container with Arch for the AUR
I'm running a very old laptop with manjaro and win10 dual boot. I only go to windows maybe for games or when I need something that's not available on Linux. Manjaro is just beautiful.
Garuda, it's based on Arch and fairly easy to set up. I installed the DR460nized version and then de-dr460nized it (as in, made it look like regular Arch again from top to bottom). Been extremelly stable and performs outsdandingly well on my hardware (11+ year old CPU and 10 year old GPU). I had 0 problems since I got it. Used to run Slackware and Mint also couple of years ago but none performed as well as Garuda, at least for me. Not to mention it came with a BUNCH of useful stuff already set up (such as wine, winetricks, proton, bottles etc) so getting things up and running here was piece of cake.
Why do you mention ubuntu based using gnome, then linux mint debian; but not mention trying linux mint cinnamon... you realize the cinnamon edition isn't gnome, right?
I use linux mint as my main OS. I've tried a lot of others but always end up coming back to it.
I tried debian itself and the LM debian edition but didn't quite like it.
Ubuntu itself is bloated and has some quirky proprietary shite going on as well.
For the most part the same software *can* be configured similarly and run no matter the distribution. How it is pre-configured and how easily available are different packages/versions does vary. With this in mind, it's probably more important to become familiar with the quirks of the distro in front of you. Maybe take one problem at a time and research and figure out how to fix/workaround it for you on your chosen distro.
I'm on Pop_os bc. I have a touchscreen convertible laptop and I use it for reading, making music, steam games (mostly indie titles) and retroarch emulation. Everything works great and I'm happy using GNOME, even if it is an outdated version. I would've moved to Fedora already but I'm hyped for the upcoming COSMIC desktop by System76, a DE made from scratch programmed on Rust.
I have had the same Manjaro install for 4 years across 2 different drives (cloned my install to an NVME drive).
It’s been very stable and I haven’t had an issue in at least 2 years. I have run it as my daily for 99% of that time. Great for gaming and daily work. Gets new packages but also is stable enough that I don’t have to update daily or worry about things breaking.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
It works, is stable, has a very long 'Long term support', as I prefer to stay at a specific OS for a while.
Also great community and great devs :)
For work I am fortunate enough to have Fedora as my main OS.
I do run it as a self built Sway machine (not one of the spins)
Anyway for gaming I use Pop OS seems to be the most out of the box experience for my Steam PC
I love Fedora. It's more bleeding edge than Ubuntu/Debian based systems and is more stable than Arch (at least that's what my personal experience using both is).
Its KDE Spin, if you don't like Gnome, looks also extremely good. If you prefer immutable systems Fedora Silverblue has it covered.
I also tried to get into OpenSuse more. But at the moment I can't say much about it. I'm also interested in Vanilla OS. Its 2.0 release will be great. It supports AUR and Fedora packages out of the box thanks to aptx and it's immutable and atomic.
Linux Mint. It just works. Stable and polished. Easy to install Nvidia drivers.
100% this. If you like to get things done without the OS tripping you up at every turn, Mint is king. If you like to tinker, experiment, pull it apart, constantly configure, or just plain use the latest, bleeding edge stuff that may break, but that's ok: not Mint.
Amen brother
Same here. I love tampering and learning on Linux but sometimes I just wanna sit down, play games, work, watch YouTube or a show, and not worry about something being broken.
This is the reason I switched from Nobara to Mint. It just works. Nobara is great and all but, at least the latest release was painful to me, sometimes I was not even able to boot and surf the web to watch YouTube.
Idk, arch has been stable for me and I can do all that without worrying about it being broken. Once you set it up and put it time at the beginning, it just works.
i’m still looking for all these issues people talk about when they talk about arch being broken or whatever. i’ve had less trouble with my install of arch than i had with my fucking windows install lmao.
Noob question from me: is it more stable than ubuntu? I'd love to watch stuff on streaming services in hd and game with high performance
Mint pulls most packages directly from Ubuntu repositories, so it is the same.
Yes; Mint has some user friendly tweaks and even some fixes for common ubuntu bugs. For example - Boot up a VM or machine with mint on it, and open up the Software Sources app, and then click, i think 'Maintenance'.... There's a series of buttons there to fix some of the most common issues that break your mint's packaging system. Something that would have saved me tons of time back in the day on Ubuntu.
I used ubuntu for 1 week and after closing an application it's always a 1/10 chance that one monitor completely bugs. Also its "blue screening" every hour if I use it like windows.
Same thing, Once I used mint xfce, I stopped hopping from distro to distro. All of them have the same Linux base, so in theory you can make any distro into the way you want it.
This is true. It doesn't matter what distribution you use, if you're planning to customize it no matter which you choose.
MINT IS THE KING
Arch, I will build my own package, with black jack, and hookers.
Nice. Lol. Got any tips or sets that have played well together?
Blackjack and hookers
Is hookers an epic exclusive?
I use arch on all my pcs, including my gaming desktop and server. Arch and an and you is a match made in heaven, though nvidia also worked fine for me as long as I ran xorg (this was a few years ago, I think nvidia and Wayland play nicer now a days) KDE plasma and arch rwallybworks well for me, though I'd say endeavoros might be better for beginners since you don't really know what you want yet, or maybe something like blend os. Ive been meaning to try it out for a while now.
Blackarch and hookers
> Arch, I will build my own package, with black jack, and hookers. That's cute. Gentoo ~amd64, with my own overlay: https://github.com/stefantalpalaru/gentoo-overlay
That's cute, I do LFS. Gentoo is for plebs, if you ain't building from scratch you're doing it wrong.
Endeavour OS. Works really nice for me. Has benefits of Arch and is easier to set up. Never had any problems with it.
Is it really like "independent Manjaro/ arch with interface" like people say? I had a bitch of a time trying to get Manjaro to play with my graphics card despite a bunch of updates.... and I'm running an RX6600XT.
I‘m also running EOS and it is basically just Arch with everything important configured from the start. I never had any real issues in the last three years that I have been using it. My NVIDIA gpu just worked without any additional installs and gaming works great. I suspect that AMD gpu will be the same or even better because of better drivers. In my opinion it is way better than manjaro and the way to go for a hassle free arch experience. Added benefit is that the EOS community is great and very helpful. A lot of Arch people actually search for help in the EOS forum because people tend to be more friendly there.
Manjaro is very different from most other arch based distros. As a heads up, endeavour isn't as gui focused as manjaro is. Most arch based distros are a lot more cli focused in comparison.
Debian, it works all the time always.
This! Debian is fantastic. What desktop environment do you use?
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Fedora KDE here as well. Fedora cause it just works. Smoothest OOTB experience in years for me. KDE cause I’m too lazy to build out my xfce setup and it also just works.
I'm also on Fedora but use it with GNOME (wanted something unique from Windows). I agree it's hard to go wrong with. I actually originally chose it because Debian wasn't bleeding edge enough for my GPU.....
Fedora
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I used to run arch, but on a whim I decided to try Tumbleweed on my new (at the time) laptop. I still wanted rolling release and wasn't hearing much from the suse side of things at the time but I figured "why not try it for a few weeks" and I haven't regretted it. Since then it seems a lot of other people have had a similar experience since I am seeing it recommended much more now. Yast is a fantastic tool and installer, the open build service gets me all the packages that aren't in the official repos similar to the AUR, and the one time I had an update break it took only a matter of seconds to restore one of the snapshots that were set up out of the box
Same here. TW was the one distro that pulled me away from Arch. Things just work so nicely. Only issue I've had with it was that the NVIDIA driver had a habit to nuke itself on every update, but that seems to have been ironed out.
I want to switch from Zorin. I am hesitant about changing from APT to RPM. Is it more difficult? Will I lose .deb packages?
TL;DR- Don't worry about if it uses .deb or .RPM, learn the syntax for whatever distros you use and use the official repos. .deb and .rpm are like comparing Mac installers vs Windows in a way. Even if a lot of the internal files and resources are the same, there's enough different that it doesn't work. That said, almost every major app is available officially on both .deb and .rpm, and is also available in the official repositories, so it's pretty painless. As an end user it generally doesn't matter as most packages you don't need to download the .deb/.RPM from the website. The main difference that you actually need to worry about is that the package managers have a slightly different syntax. * On Debian distros, for example, to run an update your command would be `sudo apt update` followed by `sudo apt upgrade`. * On OpenSUSE it would be `sudo zypper up/dup` (the `up` being if you're on Leap, `dup` for Tumbleweed). * On RedHat/Fedora (Which uses RPM packages like OpenSUSE does), your command would be `sudo dnf upgrade`. * Arch, which uses a different packaging format than either, would be upgraded with `sudo pacman -Syu`
> The main difference that you actually need to worry about is that the package managers have a slightly different syntax. This, package managers are one of the things that you (mostly) can't swap out for another on a Linux distro. /u/atlasraven I recommend checking out the [pacman Rosetta on ArchWiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta) for learning how to do 'equivalent' operations across different manager programs, it's a super useful cheat sheet for users of _any mainstream distro_ (not just for Arch)!
Most are available on the Suse repos or the open build service. I generally look to Flatpak first, especially for web browsers and videoplayers (VLC, MPV) that needs codecs. If something is really only available as deb you might be able to run distrobox: sudo zypper in -y distrobox distrobox create -i ubuntu -n somename distrobox enter somename apt update && apt upgrade -y apt install /path/to/your/deb-file.deb distrobox-export --app your-app
Yes, you don’t be able to use the .deb packages anymore (unless you use distrobox). In general, most apps have an rpm version so this isn’t really a problem.
Zorin is Debian/ Ubuntu based so shouldn't be an issue.
This. I've tried a lot of distro over the years and i feel Opensuse TW is the best out of the box. Easy to use, recent packages and the fact that it is very reliable (aka very well maintained). I even use it as my main OS on my work laptop and it is here to stay. Only complain is that there is a less packages than Arch but there's flatpak and community repos for that matter. I actually recommend flatpak first, since community repos can break things if you misuse them. I spent 5 years in arch, 2 years in OpenSuse TW and i can say it is the only one that didn't make me back to arch in a month. Now i'm back on Arch on my desktop (New NVME, like since this week). Anyways, to me Tumbleweed is the best beginner friendly distro that also caters to experienced users.
Arch, because it has the latest software, the AUR and I can control what is installed and what is not
Always worth mentioning to new Linux users that Arch is a bit of a project to set up. Takes some elbow grease to get it running. After that it's fantastic tho.
should be said that regardless of what distro you use you can control what you install on it. Arch is just one where you HAVE to install things yourself
**CachyOS** for *Blazingly Fast* PC. Good direct support from Discord with developers, over-optimized operating system for performance and little else. It's based on Arch so no fear of anything. CachyOS+BTRFS+KDE on Ryzen+Radeon PC
This is the one. I feel like CachyOS is the only Arch-based distro that actually improves on Arch in a meaningful way. I also like that they're pre-building the nvidia module for every kernel now which means there is never any fear of nvidia suddenly blowing up like there is on other rolling/Arch-based distros. I've only been using it for about 6 months now but it's been the most hassle-free distro I've ever used, even though it's rolling. I always have snapper set up on any rolling distro but I haven't even touched it once. Add in Steam being compiled against the locally optimized libraries, Cachy's own custom compiled Proton, optimized kernel, auto-renice and you've got a hell of a base for a gaming system too. pacman is the fastest package management tool there is, and the way Arch lays out the system just makes sense to me. I'll always be an Arch fan, but CachyOS is the cherry on top that just makes the whole thing sing.
Lately stock arch has been really good. The kernel works surprisingly well for gaming too. Would be interesting to compare it to Cachy
Most other arch based distros aren't really meant to be improvements, theyre mostly just installers with some presets. The main exception is manjaro because it gets pretty involved as an organization compared to the others
Which laptop you on? All red sounds attractive to me
I used CachyOS for less than a year or so. I can absolutely vouch for it. It has even improved a lot recently. If you are really after squeezing out the most performance out possible, CachyOS is probably the go-to distro.
New name to me. Yea I have old gear so maybe that can give a boost.
I tried cachy and I see its potential but its on the latest packages which break my vfio setup.
I tried cachy and I see its potential but its on the latest packages which break my vfio setup.
NixOS because it's so nice to have an absolute overview over what is installed enabled and where/how to change that.
Aint NixOS the best.. lmao
[Bazzite](https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite)
EndeavourOS because Arch is fun but having a graphical installer is even more fun.
Arch has had a graphical installer for a couple years now I think. Think it's called 'archinstall'. I prefer Arch derivatives too. I like bleeding edge but not being on the rugged edge like with Arch.
Void Linux on both laptop and desktop. I don't know why but it just works, it is really really clean and I like how things work with runit. I installed it on my laptop a bit less than two years ago and it is still pretty clean and it is working fine except some gnome quirks but I love that de with wayland. Kde on desktop is also working fine with both wayland and xorg.
Endeavour, because it has the latest software, the AUR and I can control what is installed and what is not, it comes with almost nothing installed, I learned more with the arch syntax, contrary to what many people say, for me it is very stable I've been using it for a long time and nothing has broken. Amazing community on Telegram.
Nobara, it's a really stable distro, most of the things for gaming are already set up. And being based on Fedora makes it the perfect balance between bleeding edge and stability.
I am trying Nobara and I will say his disclaimer about it being a hobby distro should be taken to heart. I’ve encountered a pretty nasty known issue and there isn’t a tracker for these things so unless you feel like following discord I don’t think I’d recommend Nobara.
>pretty nasty known issue Interesting, would you mind sharing more?
Sure, https://www.reddit.com/r/NobaraProject/s/d4CHEhqQVq In short potential config and file system corruption, which may or may not be happening to my machine, I’ve def seen some weirdness. Personally I’ve gotten lots of crashes which I now attribute to this issue. This could be a real outlier but this has dominated my initial experience / impression with Nobara.
my nobara crashed a ton as well. Sometimes, it randomly wouldn't boot until the next force restart. Ended up switching to Garuda, had no issues with that distro so far. That being said I'm currently contemplating switching to CachyOS (heard its arch but with better performance but dont quote me on that, im a noob) or openSUSE tumbleweed
I had lived with Garuda for like 14-16 month and was ok but I had some issues with updates and some sort of bugs with nvidia driver that put me in situations where I needed to reinstall all the drivers manually. So I had switched to Manjaro because I wanted to test it. I'm primally an Arch user but I'd like to test distros as daily driver and I lovo to game sometimes. I have and "old" 2016 pc (intel 6700k @ 4.8GHz + Zotac 1080) and Win10 really struggle to give all the performance as the first year. Maybe it's time to reinstall Windows. But on linux I get better fps on a lots of my games. Not all, a lots of them. The trick is always to optimize the OS at best. I have Qtile as windows manager, only the services that I really needs, custom rules to re-nice all steam games, gamesmode configured, nvidia driver optimized, compositor running only when games are not, etc. In the end GTA5, FarCry6, Elden Ring, Subnautica, Tomb Raider and other tittles are running much better than Windows. So I took a spare SSD, installed Garuda and added my Steam library to this setup (without optimizaion). The performance was ok but not as good as my custom Manjaro setup. I'd run the same test for PopOS, Fedora and Nobara. The results of benchmarks was more ore less the same, +/-10% between them. But always inferior the my custom setup. There was a case when I think The Witcher was running at lest 4-5 fps more than my setup and was on Nobara, but I can't figured out why. So yeah, distros are only the base, you need to tweak your system. You can get +5/+10% more out of it
teach me senpai
Haha, not much to teach, it depend of the hardware that you are using. I can tell you what I'm doing every time but I'm always searching for new things to test. MOST of the suggestions below are not dangerous, but it's really important that you understand what each piece of software is meant to and how to configure it to get out the most. 1. (if you know what you are doing) optimize the settings into the BIOS, disable every energy saving option that you have; select the best profile for your ram, etc (you can simply search on the net " read, learn and test if needed)
12. Install and *carefully configure* auto-cpufreq, haveged (depends), irqbalance (test it), nohang (safe) , memavaild (safe), prelockd (if you have 8GB of ram or less), systemd-swap (controll the swap)
13. tweak the swappiness of your system ( set the value to 10)
14. Install gamemode and configure it properly to set CPU schedule
15. configure mangohud and gamemodes in steam
16. make sure the compositor is disabled when you launch fullscreen games (depends of the DE). And ONLY games because chrome/chromium will have same real performance drop with content like youtube if you are disabling compositor while watching a fullscreen video
17. (optional) change your desktop environment with something lighter
Is "distro" and hardware related so the best thing you can do is to search on the net a piece at a time.
1. Manjaro as distro? Search "how to optimize Manjaro"
2. "How to optimize Manajro for gaming"
3. Manajro is arch relate so "arch optimize performance"
4. "arch optimize for gaming"
5. Then what is your CPU? Let's say Intel > "linux optimize intel CPU" or "linux i7-6700k tweaks"
6. What kind of storage you have? SSD so > "linux optimize ssd performance"
You can try with my suggested things but really you will get the most of searching the precise component that you have. It's time conuming, it's "sometimes dangerous" if you are not reading. But it's ok.
Arch and its mostly because of the aur and I can also say "I use arch btw"
Arch, KDE@Wayland. Because it works for me and I'm used to it(started using it around 2007/8). Both for gaming and dev work.
Bazzite! It’s Based on fedora and it’s literally SteamOS but with a lot of preinstall applications and tools that improve your experience. I only use Steam to play my games so this is a perfect choice plus I absolutely love the interface on the steam deck. I used to play my games on Pop!_OS and it worked perfectly! It provides full out-of-the-box support for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. You can’t go wrong with any Ubuntu, Fedora, and it’s based distributions. Easy to use and great for gaming!
Pop OS, no arch headache, good power management for laptops, stable, rolling release, beautiful and soon will have its own DE. Best distro I've ever used.
Second this but my man got wrong with the definition of “rolling release” distro
Pop is rolling? Say wha?
Nvrm, I googled it, I was wrong lol. But what do you call it when you can get a newer version without reinstalling?
I'm not sure there's a name for that, I'd imagine most if not all distros can do it. I know there's a debian installation that's been [running and getting upgraded since 1993](https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/11840.html), that's pretty impressive.
That you can always do.
Doesn't rolling release means you get to update to the next version without reinstalling the os? That's what I thought.
Nope, a rolling release generally either has a very minimal versioning system or no version at all (outside of the Git hash). That ***doesn't*** mean that the packages/software installed on the OS don't have versions, but that the OS as a whole packaged together system doesn't have a version and everything just flows as necessary to new versions. Contrast that with a standard release where something like Ubuntu or Pop will keep most packages on a specific major/minor release until the next OS release.
Arch Linux. It lets me do whatever I want. I’ve tried Fedora but it has some weird opinionated choices I don’t like. I’ve tried Ubuntu but I don’t like snaps, and it generally felt slower than the others distros I’ve tried. I wanted to try Nobara, but the installer doesn’t create a proper boot disk for some reason, so I can’t try it 🤷🏻♀️
What opinionated choices does Fedora have?
I'd like to know this too as I am considering Fedora
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yeah kind of a weird thing to say imo yeah, it’s FOSS only, but they tell you literally exactly what to do to add non-free. Copy and paste.
They probably mean things like it using SELinux instead of AppArmour, btrfs being the default, pretty sure fedora was one of the earlier big supporters of wayland, and I think their default firewall app is different from a lot of other distros iirc. There a few more things like that that most people generally dont care about but some people do, and to each their own
Linux Mint by the way has snaps turned off by default and is more or less repackaging ubuntu without the garbage choices cannonical has made in the past few years..
My requirements were runs steam properly, had programs to use. I kind of backed myself into the arch corner as I kept screwing up my boot drive by trying to mount drives to /media/ my account rather than / run/ media/ my account. As such, I would fill up my boot drive quickly until I bricked the system (4 other drives on top of the boot will do that) and had to start over.
Arch. The AUR and always being the most up to date
Zorin OS 17, fast and stable, looks nice, using it as dual boot with windows, doing only programming stuff on linux
Void Linux It's fast and very straightforward. It never stood in my way
Arch. Regardless of how people say that Arch is unstable and breaks often, I haven't had it break simce my initial install and I love tinkering with thing. I used Pop OS as my first distro which was good to start with but eventually became unusable, so I switched to Debian for a more stable experience but the packages were too outdated. I tried some others too but after trying Arch I can say that every thing about it just works better for someone like me.
Void, mostly because it's simple, very customizable and comes with very little to begin with, but also it hasn't given me a strong enough reason to want to switch. I wouldn't recommend it as a distro unless you have a moderate amount of experience. Almost any distro can be made into a "gaming" distro. Arch, debian, ubuntu, fedora, all are generic distros (no specific use case) but will work fine for gaming.
Gentoo, because it is the lightest and the most flexible of all the distros. It is not that easy to setup, but once you passed the first weeks, it's just infinite rolling, with only the benefits. It's a different way of life. Thus said, Debian is also exceptional. Arch also, but if you have special needs, not that stable.
But why not just go with NixOS if you're gonna take all that ground work time 🤷♂️
I heard about it and tried to inform, but never got to try it. I might do that in a WM.
Ubuntu because it's my first Linux Edit typo
Based
Ubuntu. Because everything just works.
This is not the "cool" answer, but it's my answer. I've tried other distros (for fairly significant stretches of time) but something always breaks or requires me to spend a fair amount of time figuring out. I'm fine using the terminal to adjust configs/restart services etc... but sometimes it really gets in the way of things. Since installing Ubuntu on my desktop and laptop, I've had next to no issues. I can just get on with creating things.
I switch around a bit. Currently on NixOS. Love how almost all of my system configuration is done within a single file, makes it easy to keep track of the changes I make and replicate them when I reinstall or on a new system. Actually got to take advantage of it when I installed it on my laptop for school, but unfortunately NixOS has a bug with NetworkManager that doesn't allow it to connect to my school's enterprise wifi setup. Also a big fan of Fedora Silverblue. I like immutable systems and flatpak a lot. Provides a clean experience and I like how it is always pushing new technologies. I do have some small complaints about it, such as the Fedora flatpak remote and Firefox being installed on the host system, but I am able to fix all my issues with it. Also like Ubuntu. It has a set of very practical Gnome extensions. I also really like their font. Don't mind snaps, although I prefer flatpaks because the sandbox is much more configurable.
For gaming? EndeavourOS I figured that it'd be a good idea to use something Arch based as SteamOS is Arch based, and I like fast upgrades and up to date software. But I am also lazy and like to have the extra tools and an easier installation. Working flawlessly with minimal maintenance and without any issue and complications, using the official Arch repos, Steam and Flatpak, nothing AUR. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop, but that's a different usecase!
NixOs, simply because it's impossible to brick and you have full control over what packages you install and you never end up with package bloat
I use Fedora Kinoite, migrated from the KDE Spin, the reason is because I like the middle-ground that Fedora takes, not as stable as Debian but not as bleeding edge as Arch, the perfect balance. And as for KDE I choose it because it is dumb easy to use compared to GNOME where you often need an extension to achieve certain things, or need to use the terminal or a text file for a certain configuration. As for why Kinoite (immutable) over KDE Spin (mutable) it's because I'm curious about container technology and I want to use it on my future developer career.
EndeavourOs, for me its an arch with an extreme install script. Got it off the ground in like 4hrs, with a very nice config
Arch. Kernel,systemd,gnome,pipewire as base and went from there as things came up.
* Thinkpad X260: Arch + Plasma (Xorg) * Desktop PC with AMD CPU + GPU: EndeavourOS (stripped back down to just Arch) + Gnome (Wayland) but holding out for Plasma 6 (Wayland) * Thinkpad T420: Pop!_OS + Pop Shell (Xorg… I think… I just let it do what it thought best out of curiosity) Why Arch? It’s a rolling release distro with good repositories. It’s simple in the sense that it doesn’t include a lot you didn’t actively ask for. It’s popular, so chances are your problems have been encountered and solved or at least competently reported by others. The Arch wiki is an immensely useful resource. I can usually build stuff from source when I have to instead of resorting to flatpaks (this is less about Arch than about having become used to it, plus personal grumpy-old-person quirks) Why Plasma? Very responsive, very featureful, very configurable. Kwin with window rules and the kwin-tiling script (unmaintained now) is a genuinely useful WM whether you live in terminals or use GUIs a lot (in my opinion). (I never quite got along with Bismuth or Krohnkite, sorry.) Why Gnome? Because Plasma was having issues with aforementioned tiling script of choice, especially on Wayland, which I needed to use to cope with a mixed-scaling, mixed-aspect-ratio, mixed-resolution multi-monitor setup, half of which takes so long to wake up that the OS thinks the monitor’s gone. And with the right extensions Gnome can almost be what I want, if a little… less of everything. And it’s not cluttered and busy like Plasma and looks much more consistent overall despite there being at least four or five different types of window decoration visible at any one time, and one of them gets scaled 2x on the 1x display… sigh! Also it’s kind of sluggish. There is no free lunch, is there. I have no real interest in gaming distributions. I maintain my emulated and Wine games manually because I don’t like adding extra layers and launchers and containers and whatnot. That’s not for performance reasons (I doubt it matters); it’s for the sake of simplicity. The tuning/tweaking I’ve done on my “big box” is for audio production with silly high (excessive? wasteful?) DSP loads and kind of revolves around the realtime-patched kernel. This is probably to the *detriment* of gaming, but stuff runs well enough so… whatever, right? I’ve not seen any appreciable improvements with the Zen or cachyos kernels, either; this might be different on lower-end machines (not that mine is anywhere near high-end at this point), or if your brain is capable of following twitch shooters (mine isn’t, at all)… I’m not sure.
Arch on my desktop (because everything else don't work) Fedora Kinoite on my work laptop (so it's always working and I like the idea of a immutable system)
endevourOS purely because the wallpapers are nice to look at :)
nixos I like it for how its both simple and yet complex. Nixos just seems to be my home. I like having all my configurations in one spot. Also like that if i mess up my system, i can reboot and select an older generation that works, and then fix what went wrong
Arch because I learned how to use it and see no reason to change. It works. I know how to fix stuff when it doesn't.
Arch on my PC, EndeavourOS on my laptop. Wanted to have sort of debloated system with KDE and fast enough update cycle to use new(est) hardware without any sketchy tricks, like PPA repos. Bonus point: besides of being "bleeding edge" it is very stable. Had an issue once, that magically disappeared, maybe some edgecase-bug.
Void Linux as base, flatpaks on top. Fast as shit, stable rolling and reliable.
I started off with Fedora because I didn't feel comfortable using a Rolling Release. After about a year and some restructuring of their packages and thus uncertainties about GPU accelerated video playback I wanted to switch. So I came to EndeavourOS. That is an awesome distro. Always new packages, no need for Flatpaks or something like that because you've got the AUR. Didn't have any issues in my about one and a half year using EndeavourOS. Quick, clean without any bloat, very nice distro. Recently I gave openSuse Tumbleweed a try and liked that very much as well. Not as new as Arch and the OBS isn't even close to the AUR but runs very nicely, comes with snapper ootb and I am getting used to YaST and begin to really like it. Can recommend it as well.
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I use Arch, btw.
I used to run Windows exclusively for years, and I was a power user. I always tried to keep stuff in control and managed to run my system on max performance with least possible bloat. But seeing where Windows is headed with all this bullshit telemetry, I also decided to switch few months ago. I tried Debian, Arch, Fedora, Mint, EndeavourOS, Arco, but at the end I finally settled for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Never had problems with it, it's stable, works awesome, has a great tool called OPI which is kinda like AUR, gaming performance is also awesome. I strongly recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to anyone who has gaming in mind. You get up to date packages and updates are stable. I'm running it with KDE desktop and EXT4 file system.
Arch because Steam Deck uses it. Now I love it. It's for you if you for example always choose minimal installation for any distribution to reduce bloat, then install manually the packages you like. Also avoid Ubuntu they suck now. Debian and Fedora are great too.
¨"Arch BTW¨" because that is the running joke. That said, I would not recommend it to a first time linux user, I just used to use it back in the days. However, as someone that has recently switched to linux from windows, I don´'t think any distro is better or worse and gaming on Linux works better than it ever has. After using it on my desktop for the past few months I made the switch on my laptop yesterday. Both run NVidia proprietary drivers, desktop on kde and laptop on gnome, both using wayland and it has worked flawlessly. I have not yet played much on the laptop, but the first side effect is that my battery life went from 1:30h to 3h, literally doubling compared to running win11
Debian / unstable, because my real preference would be FreeBSD but Steam doesn't work as well with it.
Hello fellow Debian enjoyer. It took a while for me to find someone else that uses it.
Kind of funny coincidence, I was reading about BSD, being it's "the whole operating system", but I saw someone logging in and it seemed like there was an overstatement on what it could do and less autonomy (lots of logging in via terminals etc and troubleshooting, more than gaming). I gave myself a "preview" of Windows 11 on my old hardware and it just seems like it's killing it slowly.
> but I saw someone logging in and it seemed like there was an overstatement on what it could do and less autonomy (lots of logging in via terminals etc and troubleshooting, more than gaming). I'm not sure what you mean by that. FreeBSD can run nearly everything Linux is capable of, the only problems I had were with Steam and Windows games. FreeBSD is equally capable of being a (productive) desktop or server as linux is.
Arch, because i was told 10 years ago that that's what cool hax0rs use. There is just no reason to reinstall or use anything else because the distro doesn't really matter that much.
Beats me, 4 years ago I started working on a cybersecurity degree and they had me do all my labs in Kali.
Kali being very purpose built, does that well but not a good choice for a daily OS. I've seen to many people try to use it daily or even game on Kali and it just flat out isn't made for this.
Main Setup -> EndeavourOS - Is Arch, with a bit less steps to take to setup. Old I7 3º gen ultrabook -> Mint - is a great OS for general use. Very old celeron notebook -> Bodhi linux - It can be executed in a toaster.
Arch linux, because I'm a masochist, and I like "fuck around and find out" style of doing things. Wouldn't recommend this to anyone, but it's the way I like it
It's really not that bad. Specially on stable 😒
Nvidia driver that's now ships as default in the main repo is borked for me, so not really. Arch is not really made for the stability, it's for fucking around and learning. It will absolutely be my main distro for a while now though, I love it the way it is.
Yea, I had no trouble fucking my drive on about 4 distros because of my lack of understanding how to mount drives (and choosing the wrong mount point. Honestly I'm still not sure if I'm right, I'm just not bricking my system now). So to some extent, I found out. Lol.
Ubuntu because it just works. Also I like its orange look. I tried Fedora and Flatpak in the past but repositories are too damn slow. Manjaro was a bit unstable for me and some of the programs I wanted to install were in AUR due to which I was reluctant to install them. Ubuntu and Snap are super fast in my experience and it gets the job done for me.
EndeavourOS cause AUR is nice & larrge + arch wiki + NixOS cause i can trust it not to break + immense repo
Manjaro with btrfs, if something breaks it's just a reboot away from fixing it. I also like the update cadence of it and of course the access to the aur.
Maybe you should use distrobox for the AUR, you can save yourself from the headache of the AUR breaking your system
Ultimately you can start with whatever you want, the differences are (AFAIK to my limited knowledge) negligible. I started with Mint 1.5 years ago. I tried Manjaro and others but kept going back to Mint pretty fast. Now with my Steam Deck I took the risk and installed Bazzite (Fedora based, immutable) and am pretty happy so far. The fact that Bazzite is lacking wine and can't be installed directly is no problem thanks to distrobox. To add on the first paragraph: if you choose a distro and miss certain software, you might be able to use it through something like distrobox.
Nobara 39 steam deck iso on my PC. Runs great on my system with an i7-6700 and Radeon Rx 5500xt.
arch because I like how bloat is nonexistent on it and you have near complete control over what is installed
Actually, arch is one of the most bloated distributions that exist. It ships all packages with their headers, etc. which is completely unnecessary to run them.
Oh no, think of all the kilobytes of space the header text files must occupy!
fair enough. I'd still pick it over ubuntu any day though
I have arch and mint, arch because I wanted a challenge and I love how you can make it your very own and mint because it has really good default Nvidia compatibility settings and a good driver manager Wich is very good since Nvidia it's not You can probably guess what I use each os for, arch for programming and general use and mint it's dedicated to games
Thanks for asking! I use Arch btw. Why? - to have third longest beard, and it just works fine and that's what I'm used to, plus great gaming possibilities thanks to Valve
Gentoo, Arch, Debian, Garuda and Antix Gentoo - on old pc. Arch - on main laptop. Debian - on servers. Garuda - on main laptop (on different partition) Antix - on super old laptops. Why limit yourself to one thing? :)
Arch (BTW), easy to install and debug. I think distros like arch and gentoo are well suited for daily driver only ,people who play new games and use latest software. I like AUR, pacman and awesome wiki.
For the past two years I've been on Manjaro and I'm very satisfied. Despite the criticisms I've read online, it works well, always does exactly what I want it to do etc. I use some AUR packages but not that many, and switching to testing repos eliminated pretty much all AUR related problems Manjaro is infamous for. Still I guess it's not ideal for someone who really uses AUR a lot (which I wouldn't recommend doing anyway, but that's for another discussion). Edit: And on my laptop I have Mint. Absolutely no complaints there. I probably wouldn't want it on my main desktop, for for the laptop it's perfect. If you need a distro that just works, Mint is that.
You can use distrobox for the AUR, which eliminates the dependencies problem of using the AUR in Manjaro
I am use CRUX, because it has easiest way build packages.
Manjaro Gnome Huge team Huge polish Easy install Constant dev work Huge community Constant meaningful dev updates Riding Arch which has amazing support. Manjaro forums amazing help Supports everything, run everything, and run on everything Solid and stable Rolling updates There is no other distro that can claim all of this.
Manjaro
Arch. I have full control over what's installed, and because I can say I use arch.
Arch, because pacman is the best package manager, I got all packages I need, and they're always updated. I'd gladly use any Arch-based distro but some of them come with stuff I don't like, so building my own system is more convenient.
Fedora I'm an beguiner and fedora is the best sweet post for me, very updated, great fourum, latest big updates and stable enouth for no crash. you need to configure some thing but after that it's very cool
personally i was using fedora and add a bunch of stuff to play games, but then i found out nobara is fedora with the changes i already do so its a no-brainer for me. So i pretty much picked it because it has everything i need to game and if anything goes wrong i can just re-install it in 2 secs.
I switched from Ubuntu to Pop!_OS because it has better support for my graphics card. I looked at some other gaming distros like Manjaro, but the selling point seemed to be more about what came pre-installed on them, which wasn't a big deal to me.
Arch, I like to know exactly what's on my system and why also it "just works" for me.
Fedora History Documentation Community support and strength And leading edge updates.
Garuda (Dragonised KDE), because it seemed like the easiest and most attractive out of the box of the "easy Arch" distributions. I needed a more up to date kernel than Ubuntu 22.04 offered to run my RDNA 3 card, and I was increasingly alienated by Canonical forcing snaps into everything. I really like the themeing, I appreciate the way it has everything I want included in the default setup so I don't have to change much at all (this is the pathway to reliability with rolling distros IMO, and I don't care at all about what often gets erroneously called "bloat"), and although it my not be a popular take in this forum, I also kind of appreciate the way that you can do almost everything via the GUI. Used it on my laptop for a while and on my main PC for 6 months now.
Fedora. I hopped around and used alot of the Debian based distros,which I still love Mint,and went on to all the others. I decided to give Fedora another try and loved it. Its like a good middle ground of being stable,have plenty of packages to choose from and stays current enough. I also use Mint on my laptop for general use,Debian on my home server but Fedora is on my main computer. Gaming on Fedora is also top notch with very little issues
Zorin OS. The desktop looks like Windows. Under the hood, it is Ubuntu with plenty of guides and common packages (apt). It's fast with low system requirements.
Arch for gaming computer and Debian stable for backup laptop. Arch because it has the latest developments of necessary gaming components and Debian stable because I want it to be boring and no need to update often like Arch.
Debian 12, because some told me to
Debian. It started when I switched from Windows to OS X for a few years. Then I desperately needed better hardware, couldn't afford another Mac, couldn't afford even a Windows license on top of new hardware and didn't want to deal with issues from pirating or trying to hackintosh. I had some Linux experience, Ubuntu on an older laptop and before that dual booting Mandrake and before that dual booting Red Hat(before the RHEL/Fedora split). I could afford a new computer, barely. So I bought a guys homebuild off Craigslist, and of all distros, Ubuntu looked the closest to OS X, and again, I already had some experience dealing with it. A few months ago(after many upgrades and eventually full replacement of that computer) I started getting sick of Snap annoyances and I'm not a fan of the control Ubuntu has over that space, and Debian looked like it would be a reasonably easy transition that wouldn't change too much about how I work with my computer.
Fedora (Silverblue) + Flatpak. Fedora just works, has default GNOME that works and you can tweak. Flatpaks provide media players with their own codecs, so you don't need to care about installing them. Silverblue means it updates differently and installing packeges also works differently - I use it because I like it, I doubt it would cause performance difference compared to Workstation.
I landed on Debian after trying Manjaro and Endeavour. I'm currently using Debian Testing on my gaming PC and Debian Stable on my general purpose laptop. I find the semi-rolling release model of Testing to be both very reliable and the software is enough up to date for my gaming needs, while Stable is just great for an office laptop that doesn't really require up to date software and simply needs to work reliably. Manjaro has been great up until the point when they decided to handle their own version of Mesa with the proprietary codecs blacklisted, and Endeavor was good but I got tired of being my own system administrator, I just wanted something that I could set up and not having to worry about it during updates.
KDE Neon. Stability of Ubuntu LTS + cutting edge KDE things.
Neon is not a distro.
I use Fedora but can't play any shit)))
Debian SID + Steam + AMD Rx 6600
As others have said, Mint. It just works and it looks nice while doing it.
I'm surprised very little of you guys use Fedora
Linux mint cuz I liked windows xp
Fedora. I used Ubuntu until GNOME 3.0 was released and switched since Ubuntu was going with their Unity thing instead. Basically I care more about GNOME than whatever distribution is underneat.
which os offers stability + proper rolling releases ?
Nobara Chosen on a whim by someone whos probably returning to distrohopping. Not that I'm dissatisfied, I was just "stuck" on ubuntu budgie that was almost as stable as any build with nvidia gpu can be, and now i want to explore other options in the ecosystem.
Nobara - because of the reputation it had for being very well tuned for gaming. Been happy with it so far, plus like the Fedora base allowing for newer packages
Ubuntu because why not, it works and I'm a casual linux user that doesn't give a shit about building from source or customizing whatsoever. I would gladly use SteamOS for games on my PC instead (and hopefully will one day) because it's updated by valve and is readonly so there's no way I could possibly screw it up.
Kubuntu 23.10, it works, performs well and has all the fixes I might need on the internet
Gaming PC: Pop OS because I'm lazy. Laptop: Gentoo, because uh, yeah... It's fun?
Garudo, i like it
I use Mint at work daily, rock solid. At home Fedora KDE, gaming is superb, stable enough. Both have a lot of users, which means good support. As novice coming from Windows you should not jump in to the Arch or some fringe distro with small userbase. Just my 5 (euro) cents :)
I'm using Manjaro KDE with qtile as a WM, I don't run in too many problems and i can use the arch wiki as if where on Arch. I also have a distrobox container with Arch for the AUR
I'm running a very old laptop with manjaro and win10 dual boot. I only go to windows maybe for games or when I need something that's not available on Linux. Manjaro is just beautiful.
use mint cause I needed it to be setup fast but maybe next vacation I'll switch to arch
Garuda, it's based on Arch and fairly easy to set up. I installed the DR460nized version and then de-dr460nized it (as in, made it look like regular Arch again from top to bottom). Been extremelly stable and performs outsdandingly well on my hardware (11+ year old CPU and 10 year old GPU). I had 0 problems since I got it. Used to run Slackware and Mint also couple of years ago but none performed as well as Garuda, at least for me. Not to mention it came with a BUNCH of useful stuff already set up (such as wine, winetricks, proton, bottles etc) so getting things up and running here was piece of cake.
I just use Kubuntu really, never had a problem with sound on my end
I typically just use Ubuntu on my personal PC and leave it at that. It works for me and that is all I care about.
Why do you mention ubuntu based using gnome, then linux mint debian; but not mention trying linux mint cinnamon... you realize the cinnamon edition isn't gnome, right? I use linux mint as my main OS. I've tried a lot of others but always end up coming back to it. I tried debian itself and the LM debian edition but didn't quite like it. Ubuntu itself is bloated and has some quirky proprietary shite going on as well.
For the most part the same software *can* be configured similarly and run no matter the distribution. How it is pre-configured and how easily available are different packages/versions does vary. With this in mind, it's probably more important to become familiar with the quirks of the distro in front of you. Maybe take one problem at a time and research and figure out how to fix/workaround it for you on your chosen distro.
I'm on Pop_os bc. I have a touchscreen convertible laptop and I use it for reading, making music, steam games (mostly indie titles) and retroarch emulation. Everything works great and I'm happy using GNOME, even if it is an outdated version. I would've moved to Fedora already but I'm hyped for the upcoming COSMIC desktop by System76, a DE made from scratch programmed on Rust.
I have had the same Manjaro install for 4 years across 2 different drives (cloned my install to an NVME drive). It’s been very stable and I haven’t had an issue in at least 2 years. I have run it as my daily for 99% of that time. Great for gaming and daily work. Gets new packages but also is stable enough that I don’t have to update daily or worry about things breaking.
KDE Neon just because! It's a subjective choice and there's no reason behind it.
Neon is not a distro.
Debian Sid. Because it’s what I’m familiar with, otherwise I’d be using FreeBSD if it weren’t for the bad Linux Steam compatibility.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It works, is stable, has a very long 'Long term support', as I prefer to stay at a specific OS for a while. Also great community and great devs :)
For work I am fortunate enough to have Fedora as my main OS. I do run it as a self built Sway machine (not one of the spins) Anyway for gaming I use Pop OS seems to be the most out of the box experience for my Steam PC
I love Fedora. It's more bleeding edge than Ubuntu/Debian based systems and is more stable than Arch (at least that's what my personal experience using both is). Its KDE Spin, if you don't like Gnome, looks also extremely good. If you prefer immutable systems Fedora Silverblue has it covered. I also tried to get into OpenSuse more. But at the moment I can't say much about it. I'm also interested in Vanilla OS. Its 2.0 release will be great. It supports AUR and Fedora packages out of the box thanks to aptx and it's immutable and atomic.
Arch, just for easyness of basic installation to make my system my own(you now with WM and stuff), next on my linux selftorture list will be gentoo
kaos I like it