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.😄

  • HayadSont@discuss.online
    1·
    7 hours ago

    Fam, with all due respect, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you’ve ‘properly’ engaged with my previous reply. Don’t get me wrong, it’s your absolute prerogative to disregard/move-on/disengage/let-go especially if you’re already moved on. The daunting task to read a wall of text concerning a subject you’ve internally closed/‘solved’ ain’t everyone’s cup of tea anyways. The reason I’ve brought this up, is because most of how I would respond to your latest reply is already contained within my previous reply 😅. As such, I will refrain from reiterating what I’ve said before for the sake of brevity. Instead, I’ll try to strictly address the unaddressed. I’ll also take the liberty to assume that you’re not a fan of consuming long-form content. This will also be reflected in the remainder of this reply.

    my phrasing gave everyone else enough information that they could just suggest a distro

    Suggesting a distro ain’t hard; CTRL + click here consecutively to get a random stream of distros. Even if we would limit it to the union of gaming distros with (semi-)rolling release distros, there’s a lot to choose from. As such, mentioning what’s out there ain’t impressive. But expertly navigating between them sure as hell is.

    Granted, suggesting a (new) distro wasn’t even the objective. You wanted comparisons… Or, rather, I assumed you did.

    CachyOS was baremetal on my machine.

    It would probably have saved us both a bunch of trouble if you had been transparent/explicit about this. I can’t read your mind nor do I like to assume stuff.

    but instead asked for a comparison between three distros that were (somehow) selected by you.

    They’re all gaming distros, dude. I felt like that was evident.

    Please allow me to clarify that it wasn’t entirely clear why these gaming distros were specifically selected, while others like CachyOS, ChimeraOS, DraugerOS, Jovian-NixOS, PikaOS and Regata OS were not.

    I’m sorry this whole post discussion has not gone the way you wanted

    Fam, I got literally no stakes in this discussion. Apologies if I made you uncomfortable (or something) by making you think otherwise. I was merely in it to help/assist/support/aid you to the best of my abilities. For this, I required more input so that I wouldn’t have to succumb you under multiple walls of text. I didn’t think asking you to answer “could you perhaps be more clear on what it is you’d like to tinker/tweak/customize in the first place? Please, if possible, be explicit.” was unreasonable. But perhaps I was wrong.

    but it’s gone the way I wanted. And I believe I’ve found something that works for me.

    I sure hope so, fam. I wouldn’t want to see you return with your tail between your legs.