So I’m looking for a new distro rec and having a hard time landing on one. I started off on PopOS for a couple of years and it was fine, but I wanted something a little different, then I switched to Bazzite and found out I love KDE and dislike immutable distros.
I primarily use my machine for gaming and secondarily for small coding projects and a lil home labbing. And based on my previous selections you can probably tell I don’t want to have to mess with a lot of settings or configurations to get coding or gaming.
I’m currently leaning towards EndeavuorOS or Garuda, but wanted to hear some other opinions.
For a little more background I checked out Manjaro and Nobara, but liked Endeavuor a bit more. My GPU and CPU are both AMD and relatively new.
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I’ve been using endeavourOS for 1,5 years already and love it. Most of my games run with little to no tinkering. I’ve had no major issues that I couldn’t resolve with some googling or asking someone who knew better. Before I ended up with endeavourOS I have tried several distros ( mx Linux, Ubuntu, Garuda, Fedora, nobara, popOS ) and with all of them I had different issues that I was not too keen on troubleshooting. I would avoid Garuda and just go with Arch or endeavourOS for gaming.
EndeavourOS and Garuda are the same distro with a different default KDE theme, which you can install on any distro with KDE.
I personally would recommend vanilla arch, use arch-install command if you don’t want to do it manually. Then spend some time making it truly yours. At least if you wanna be on Arch, which is the best distro for ricing, finding software easily and having to learn a few things every now and then in case something break, as Arch needs some maintenance.
Now you may argue that EOS and Garuda are easier Arch installs with some defaults, but if you’re gonna be on Arch then the first time is best if it’s vanilla Arch, learn what you want and what you don’t, learn how the Arch way is done on there, and then when you have done that but can’t be arsed to do it again and again every time something breaks and you go for a reinstall, then go for the easier way.
If you just want recent software and none if the hassle of Arch then just go with Fedora KDE, OpenSUSE Tumbkeweed/Slowroll, or any of the trillion of distros, including Debian Testing.
nixos
In all cases when you don’t know what exactly distro you want – use Debian. Debian is a default Linux.
Do note that if you intend to use Debian for gaming, you’ll probably want to enable Backports for access to newer kernel and firmware packages.
Personally I prefer Debian for servers and something like Fedora Workstation for desktop/laptop. More recent packages and frequent updates on Fedora.
My advice doesn’t apply to you because you actually know what exactly distro you want :)
Fair enough
Super happy with Fedora. Both KDE and Gnome spins are great. So far no stability issues. The only thing I miss from EndeavourOS is AUR, but honestly, most apps I use are available in flatpak or homebrew anyway.
Yeah pretty much all my apps have flatpaks which is nice. I haven’t messed with arch based yet so AUR will be new to me
have been happy using fedora workstation for over five years now 😊
I also keep a silverblue disk as a portable install to help debug iffy systems.
Neat. Wasn’t aware of silverblue. I’ll drop it into my Ventoy USB :)
I’ve never used EndeavourOS or Manjaro, but if you’re looking for something similar to Bazzite (gaming-ready, not immutable) and Arch-based I’d check out CachyOS. I’ve been using it for a good while now and I really like it.
I missed CachyOS in my perusing, this looks nice too! I’ll have to check into it more, thanks!
EndeavorOS. All the goodness of Arch, plus an easy install.
I haven’t tried Garuda yet, but that’d be second on my list.
I’m really looking forward to ReactOS maturing a bit more so more of the software I want runs on it. I’m pretty excited about a modern microkernel.
Garuda and EndeavourOS are literally the same distro with a different default KDE theme. You can go to KDE settings, themes and search sweet candy or sweet Mars or whatever it was called and install it on EOS.
Maybe Garuda has the chaotic AUR by default I don’t remember but since you’re still on Arch and therefore expected to rtfm you should probably just figure out how to install it on EOS instead tbh, assuming you really want/need it
I don’t want to. What did I say that made you think I wanted to switch?
I said Endeavor was my first choice; Garuda would be my second choice. Basic Arch with one of the installation helpers would be my third.
I’ve only installed Arch from scratch once, and I won’t do that again since I don’t have to.
I’ve used both. Endeavor have a nice arm distro on my desktops I’m using the vanilla Garuda isos. It doesn’t install everything for you out of the box. But assuming you aren’t afraid of yay or pacman that isn’t a problem. Both are very close to arch. But offering a bit more modern install experience. I’ve done lfs/Gentoo/vanilla arch. And they were fine learning experiences. But if you want a simple to install, lean weeding Edge system. Where you don’t have to hope that your software is released as a flat pack in order for you to easily this version. Either one is pretty decent.
Garida has the most polished easy Arch and fully tweeked KDE experiance i have found. I think that it is the best introductory Arch distro out there. Dragonized edition comes fully loaded with all your gaming needs packaged up in the distro. Comes with chaotic AUR already installed so most of what you want from the AUR is precompiled and doesn’t have to be built.
10/10 would recommend.
try arch, it’s genuinely good
I love Arch
Kubuntu is good
I liked endeavouros but I switched to tuxedoos, endeavour broke my 8bitdo controller with a recent update, but tuxedo worked perfectly fine.
I’m not a Fedora user, but seems like a middle ground between Bazzite and Fedora for your desktop, could be to use distrobox to have the mutable part. I don’t know exactly how much configuration fedora needs, maybe none. Anyways, distrobox is a good tool to have no matter what distro or type.
Let me be the one to go against the grain and say Fedora
I’ll second that. I’ve been using Fedora KDE for almost a year as my sole desktop OS with no notable issues and really only one minor gripe. Which is that my 240Hz monitor gains a distracting flicker at 240Hz, but if I set it to 120Hz it goes away.
My only gripe is that I still can’t get PCVR working from my Quest to Fedora
I can’t speak to the Quest support as I don’t have one, but my Index definitely had issues when I first switched to Linux fulltime. I had been dual-booting for about a year prior to that. But over the last year, it’s gotten better and most titles I’ve tried lately seem to just work the same way they did on Windows.
I do still have this persistent issue where my computer treats the headset as the primary display during bootup if have it plugged in, but that’s OS independent and starts at POST.
I’ve also seen some changelogs a while back suggesting Valve was trying to get OpenVR and SteamVR more compatible and make them both work better on Linux. I don’t know what issues you were having or how recently but it might be worth digging into again if it’s something you care about.
If you want a Fedora based gaming distro, Nobara is probably your winner.
If you want a Debian based gaming distro, Pika OS.
