tldr:
What reliable, up-to-date, linux distro would you recommend a gaming softwareengineer and privacy enthusiast?
Full text:
Hey all,
I know this is the age old question, but I would like to ask it anyway.
I am currently switching from windows to linux on my main pc and am on the hunt for a fitting distro. I am a software developer and used to working with wsl, debian servers, etc. I selfhost a bunch of things and know my way around the linux commandline and would call me privacy enthusiast that uses a lot of FLOSS software. I also do occasional gaming but I guess that should work on any distro with enough work.
My thought regarding a few distros:
- I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too “old” for my liking.
- Ubuntu - Canonical is out for me.
- I also looked at fedora, and liked it, but after reading more and knowing it is backed by IBM and that is US based I am not too sure anymore. I ideally would want to have something independent. Although being backed by a company promises continuous work in the future (with the risk of becoming bad).
- OpenSUSE tumbleweed seems promising (german origin!) but also quite intimidating as it is apparently mostly targeted towards power users and I am not sure if it fits an all purpose desktop pc.
- Arch based distros seem great as it contains all the newest packages and is infinitifly customizable. But the KISS nature of arch and the (as far as I understood) high effort to get everything running is a bit intimidating when switching from windows. But I also do like the fact that it ships with only the bare minimum and not anything bloated.
Further more I somehow think that using a base distro (in comparison to a fork of a fork…) is more ideal as they receive updates, etc faster. But that is just a feeling and I couldn’t argue more precisely about it.
Regarding a DE I am definitely going KDE.
I would be very happy for some tips, opinions or pointers in the right direction to continue and finally get rid of windows… Well at least mostly. I guess i will keep it in dual boot as I do play a few games that unfortunately won’t run on linux.
Thanks in advance already!
I would recommend Trisquel. It’s 100% free, recommended by FSF, based on Ubuntu, MATE environment, but there is also a KDE version, everything works okay.
Based on your write-up, one of the Arch based distros is likely your best bet. My strong recommendation would be EndeavourOS. It is awesome.
If you use EOS, install both the current stable kernel and the LTS one. Use current day-to-day. In the very rare instance that you have a kernel or driver issue, boot into LTS.
Fedora is a great distro. As a non-American, I would say that you do not need to be so focussed on either IBM or the “American” control over Fedora.
1 - Fedora has a great community and a strong commitment to Free Software. Independence from Red Hat’s commercial agenda is the very reason it exists.
2 - Even in a worst case scenario, you are not locked into Fedora and switching is low risk and easy. There is little downside to enjoying Fedora now even if something was to happen later (however unlikely).
3 - modern Linux distros are almost all built from the exact same base elements. Fedora is really no more exposed than anything else.
4 - Red Hat is a driving force behind half the technology at the heart of whatever distro you will end up on including SystemD, Wayland, Pipewire, Glibc, GCC, and the Linux Kernel itself. To repeat point number 3, you are no less exposed to the influence of IBM/Red Hat on Ubuntu or even Arch.
I mean, you could use something like Chimera Linux that avoids SystemD, GCC, and Glibc. But you would still be using Wayland, Pipewire, and of course the kernel. And Chimera does not sound what you are looking for.
I would recommend EOS but I would not avoid Fedora for the reasons you cite.
Good job eliminating Ubuntu.
I Second EndeavourOS as a gaming distro, I’ve installed it on my girlfriends laptop (Amd Lenovo IdeaPad) an It’s been running without issues since 2020, She mainly uses it to do video/image editing and gaming on steam. And you an keep it up to date from system dialogs menu without much hassle. I’ve been a long time arch user. Mostly using it to play online and programming. Recommend Amd video cards if you are able to choose.
Gentoo is also a good candidate. The drawback is that being source based, updates can take more than on binary distribution, but its wiki is very well written with a lot of use cases.
I’d just go Tumbleweed
Seems like you answered your own question. If a gaming software engineering privacy enthusiast isn’t a power user, I don’t know what is.
Also, Tumblweed really isn’t intimidating. Give it a try.
Figure out what qualities you want in an OS, pick out a few distros that have those qualities, and make usb sticks that you can live boot. Use each one as though it was your actual system for a few days and get a feel for it. Then install the one that you like best, or go back to the drawing board. But pick one that suits you, not one that meets someone else’s needs.
This mentality that “Corporate backed stuff is bad” should be thrown out of the window. Alot of evil corporations have contributed to make Linux better for everyone.
Regardless, have you tried Debian Stable with Backports?
Have you looked at Linux Mint or other Ubuntu derivatives that have programs compatible with Ubuntu without all the scuff Ubuntu is known to do bad
Again, are you sure affiliations with IBM and Redhat makes Fedora worse? Can you justify this statement?
An even better question might be, what is present in Fedora that is not also found in Debian?
Is it RPM? Because RPM was Free Software and GPL licensed for over a decade already when the Arch Linux project was started. And of course, RPM is used in many other distros including the apparently totally European driven and unfettered SUSE distro.
Tumbleweed absolutely is an all purpose distribution. Most distributions are. Very few are specialised enough to make a difference.
And they really mostly all install the same thing in the end. It doesn’t matter which one you choose. Just pick something that’s not obscure and that has a release cycle that works for you.
For kde, I’d say that the best maintained ones are suse, fedora and kubuntu, in that order (although with the latter you still get Ubuntu, so ymmv).
Well from what you’re saying I’d go for something like EndeavourOS.
Based on arch, usable out of the box but without much preinstalled so that you can do your own mix. Manjaro is a bit similar but with more preinstalled (and maybe more bugs from what I read).
Endeavouros is useless, there is no reason to pick it over Arch. It offers no valuable additional features.
It offers a good installer, a decent out of the box setup, useful helper scripts, and a helpful community. That’s a lot more than Arch!
EndeavourOS is almost indistinguishable from Arch once installed. On that we agree.
The idea that getting it there has no value is something we can disagree on. You do not have to agree with me. That is not a problem.
I just installed EndeavourOS on a 2020 T2 MacBook Air the other day. All the hardware worked flawlessly after the point and click install. Read the vanilla Arch instructions for that hardware sometime.
EndeavourOS offers a path to installing Arch that is painless and offers a high chance of success. It configures the system well. It is easy to recommend.
Same kernel as Arch, 99.9% of the software is installed from the same repos. AUR is enabled out of the box. Just works. No brainer.
And even though Arch only adds about a dozen optional packages on top of Arch, some of them are pretty useful.
I NEVER recommend Manjaro. They hold back packages for “security/stability” reasons which is antithetical to Arch’s structure. This can cause stability issues (happened to me) and even breaking your system.
didn’t manjaro break the aur twice?
LOL, did they? It wouldn’t surprise me. I remember there was some internal in-fighting going down, someone got accused of stealing funds, buying a personal laptop. Drama aside, it is a dangerous Arch derivative that is highly promoted, especially for newbies. Sad.
I would recommend Arch, EndeavourOS or Garuda (awesome KDE gaming ed,) and a lot of peeps like CachyOS, mostly for their customized kernels/CPU optimizations. You can get CachyOS kernels inside of Garuda as well.
Cachyos convinced me to be arch based for the first time since 2010.
You summarize it quite well. But I would still recommend Arch (but as an Arch user since 2008 I am biased on this). Why?
- Lightweight, ideal for gaming. My full-featured Wayland-setup with labwc runs with ca. 2 gigabytes of RAM, including Firefox, which on it’s own currently takes up 800 megabytes. Not that RAM would be an actual issue on modern gaming setups, but still, this shows how little resources the system needs for itself.
- Gaming on Linux is pretty much solved nowadays thanks to Valve (Steam, Proton, etc.) and Flatpaks. Games that do not work are intentionally made to not work on other platforms than Windows due the games using ring0 spyware as DRM and for anti-cheat.
- Privacy by concept – while there are no specific measures taken regarding privacy, the default installation just does nothing except initializing the hardware and allowing the user to sign in. Everything else is up to you.
- Software development is – like gaming – a no-brainer. All common tools work on Linux. Even more: Dependency handling, setting up the environment, using different compilers – all this feels much smoother than on Windows.
- Maintainability is great. Since there are no package changes from upstream, you can be sure that bugs are typically bugs in the software and not coming from Arch packaging.Thanks to rolling release you get much less updates at the same time compared to fixed release distribution – ganted you update regularly. I check the news and update every 1-2 weeks at the weekend.
And since you’re coming from Windows, you have to learn new stuff anyways. So why not dive head first into Arch?
arch or fedora, opensuse tumbleweed is fine though zypper is pretty bad. not using fedora or ubuntu due to the company behind them just seems really stupid to me.
I was about to suggest Debian and Gnome. 😂
Well thank you, but in the moment I think no thank you 😂
Like others have said Arch is not as intimidating as it would appear to be. Over the last couple of years, they improved IHMO the most difficult process for the average user of installing Arch. You now just run
archinstallThen follow the system prompts. It’s constantly being improved. If you do go with Arch, aside from using Pacman to install apps, you can use “Yay” or “Paru” or others which pull from the vast AUR repository.I used Arch for a few years and recently moved over to Aurora Linux (Immutable KDE distro adapted from Fedora’s CoreOS and uBlueOS which is an offshoot of CoreOS) Specifically, I use the Developer experience of Aurora which gives you a VSCode type of editor as well as Podman desktop included as well as other items. It’s meant for those who wish to develop and not have to worry about keeping the system up to date. It runs updates in the background and rebooting your system will run the updates.
The reason I left Arch was simple, I used to like to live on the edge of software as well, until it took one too many hastily released updates which borked my Arch system. My home PC has morphed from being my dedicated computer to my wife’s and my computer which is fine, but I’d like to keep it available for her avoiding the need to do a repair because an update broke it.
Keep an eye out for the KDE Linux OS which they have in development and not yet for use, but is earmarked for being the official immutable OS for KDE which will receive their bleeding edge updates. https://linuxiac.com/kde-announced-its-kde-linux-distro/ https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux
I plan on migrating to that once it’s finished. :) I’ve become a fan of immutable OS’s because they allow you to roll back if something should go wrong. Which it rarely does :)
until it took one too many hastily released updates which borked my Arch system
That is one of the major fears I have with arch, as arch is apparently the distro where this is the most likely to happen. Is there something to recommend to minimize these risks? Just use btrfs and do a snapshot before doing anything :D ?
Remember that you can always have current versions of programs by using flatpak and appimage on Debian.
I’m currently on Fedora because my hardware was not supported yet by Debian when I got it. I’ve had a lot more problems with Fedora than Debian though and intend to go back to Debian when 13 comes out and use flatpak for the applications that I really want to be at their current version.
I have similar values to yours re community and privacy.
