Which distro?

EndeavourOS, Simply Arch with an installer, has KDE as an option for DE.

I use it, I love it. Arch is great. E-OS just cuts out the first few hours/days of set up.

Lol that's on my current rig. It's not bad, but I feel if that I'll end up back on arch instead of having the endeavouros overlay.
- Why?
Endeavour is really good
Endeavour is great but it's not simply Arch with an installer. Quite a few things are configured differently under the hood.

I use arch btw

Because others already suggested Arch/ EndeavourOS, I'll be suggesting something else: Bazzite.

It's part of the image based ("immutable") Fedora series and is basically Fedora Kinoite, with all drivers and codecs already set up for you, self managing, with many gaming tweaks included.

It's rock solid and basically unbreakable, while also being extremely modern and updated. On Arch, even if it doesn't break, you always get the newest stuff, which might not be as polished. On Fedora, it matures a few months, while still being very modern.

The main target group is "For Linux users who don't want to use Linux", meaning, it runs all your favourite stuff (KDE, etc.) without having to care for anything. It even updates itself automatically in the background without any interference.

If you prefer something with less "bloat" (a lot of optional tools and software to choose from, but nothing mandatory), then check out Aurora, which is basically the same, but without gaming stuff.

For more information, check out universal-blue.org

Just a small heads up for OP: You have to do quite a lot of (advanced) things differently from now on if you choose Atomic.

Use containers (Distrobox, etc.) for everything you can, avoid installing stuff on the host if possible, etc.

Just use Flatpaks for 95% you do graphically, and for CLI stuff or software that isn't available as Flatpak, I would recommend you to create an Arch Distrobox container (already set up IIRC) and use that. You can even install stuff from the AUR and export it, so it works just like it is supposed to.

Thanks for the detailed response. Yeah I'm reading up on distrobox.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed.

Since no one answered you here, I'll say distrochooser.de isn't bad at all. For the new linux user who is comfortable enough trying new things, I think it's perfect. It does lose its usefulness if you've already tried all of the options it offers, but at that point you probably don't need distrochooser anyway.

Awesome, thanks I appreciate the response. This makes sense.

Personally, I find Debian pretty good these days. I used to default to Testing, but I've gravitated towards stable.

Honestly, in the age of Flatpak and Steam, almost any distro works.

Ok thanks. Good to hear.
Funny, flatpak works on MX, but it kills performance. I launch any flatpak program and it's literally up to five minutes to launch. After re-imaging and using AppImages instead, it's blazing fast. There must be something about the way MX implements flatpaks that screws the pooch.
- nah, it's basically my experience with flatpak and snaps on ANY distro on ANY machine. the fact that everyone's moving to this crap is beyond me. Am I the only person on the planet that expects a modern computer to run snappier than a PC from early 2000? sure seems like it sometimes, especially when pretty much any software released since 2018 runs electron. Hell, now every manufacturer is moving to ARM like it's some revolutionary hardware - no, it just vastly improved energy usage AT THE EXPENSE OF PERFORMANCE. we might as well stick with what we have and just pump less energy into the damn thing and have the exact same results.
  
  blimey.
  
  I get the convenience; I do ...but it can't possibly be worth the sacrifices?? sigh.
  
  the day of coders who knew what they were doing is long since gone. now it's just click and play frameworks to pump out garbage and oversaturate the ecosystem.

Arch w/ KDE gamer here. I have generally had a good experience with it. I think everything you said is generally accurate. In terms of customization, lack of bloat, and a good wiki, Arch is generally considered to be all of those things. A rolling distro like Arch I believe will also be getting the latest proton updates, which may help with sooner game compatibility/optimization updates on more recent releases.

I say go for it.

Thanks for your feedback.

Look into:

Bazzite (Fedora Atomic)
Nobara (Fedora)
ChimeraOS (Arch, AMD-only)
Garuda (Arch)

All are preconfigured for gaming. Bazzite and Nobara use the fsync kernel, not sure what Chimera uses, and Garuda uses the zen kernel.

Otherwise, Arch is still the most popular choice for gaming if you look at the statistics.

Thanks, I'll look into them.

I run Gentoo as my main distro, and have for a couple years now. It's a pretty stable rolling release (IMO more stable than Arch), and since you're already an advanced user, the experience should be pretty rewarding!

The wiki is great, and the installation handbook is top notch.

You get to control exactly what features each package is compiled with, so no bloat at all.

KDE 6 just landed too!

Thanks, I'm investigating Gentoo. It's rolling release and custom built. Updated frequently is good and stability is good too, IMO.

I use Debian stable because I'm tired of constantly twiddling with breaking stuff, I just want a distro that keeps working without issues and tinkering.

If you still want to learn Linux stuff and debug packages, then go for a bleeding edge distro.

Understood, thanks for the response.

I don't have anywhere near your experience, but the key points (customizable, no bloat, good wiki) all scream Arch, as you predicted 🙂

Understood

I game on arch (btw) But honestly I don't think the distro itself really matters for gaming? Just choose the one you want and give er

It kinda does matter if you want updated drivers and packages and stuff. I use Debian because I love its bare bones, generic approach and I'm used to it, but I'd never recommend it for anyone playing the latest games unless they like cruising five years in the past.
- That's what I thought about debian is that it's very stable, but this causes drivers and possibly other stuff to not be updated as quickly.
Valid point.

I kind of wanted to see if there's something I wasn't aware of.

uBlue Bazzite. Nothing better than that.

Customizable is a broad term.

Yes I understand. I like to tinker and fiddle with dials and buttons so to speak. I want to be able to make my system do whatever I tell it. Change icons, buttons, widgets, as well as being able to remove/ avoid apps that I don't use.
- These are all configurable per-user, so no issue at all. SDDM themes are an exception, here you can use sddm2rpm or other methods. sddm2rpm is the most elegant, without changing much on the system.
  
  You can also install rpm packages.
  
  Go to discussion.fedoraproject.org if you need help. Use the tags #atomic-desktops #rpm-ostree and similar ones and you will get help quickly.
- This is still fully possible on Immutable distros (which is why the name is misleading, but unfortunately is what stuck- "image-based" is a better description) and uBlue has a mechanism for it- since they're delivered using OCI containers, it's trivial to fork or derive from the project and add, remove or tweak whatever you need. There's also BlueBuild which is YAML but that's a third party project.

I always come back to OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Once I have everything setup, it's stable as a rock and kde works really well on it.

Not many of you left these days it feels, any debate I always see openSUSE is missing, I don't use it myself atm, but it was my rock in the past. Either openSUSE community is not vocal or it's just very tiny on lemmy.

I like CachyOS

Arch is pretty good, but it's fairly easy to break it, if you don't know what you're doing. For gamers I recommend Bazzite. It's an image-based fork of Fedora Atomic (Universal Blue). You can also try other ublue-based distros such as Aurora or Bluefin. Or Fedora Atomic flavors like Silverblue and Kinoite. In fact, you can easily switch between them without reinstalling your system. All it takes is one command, and ostree will do the magic.

Thanks for the links. I'll read up on it.

i use a minimal arch with the zen kernel and hyprland for home, work and play. no kde/gnome. for me it's just right. except screen sharing in teams or discord, which haunts me... now it works, now it doesn't.

Vencord or equicord can sort that out tbh.
- I use webcord and ferdium. But I also tried the official apps and even the web apps with Firefox, chromium or zen. Nope.

Aurora is cool, if you're okay with using an immutable distro. It is Fedora Atomic-based with KDE on top, so it is stable, but relevant. All necessary drivers are set up out of the box, but less pre-installed apps than Bazzite.

In your situation, I would go for endeavourOS, since it is arch in easy mode (don’t need as much time as arch and works flawlessly on all my machines)

I'm already running endeavouros and thinking of going back to arch to remove the extra overlay.
- Just uninstall eos-hooks and then comment out the eos repos in pacman.conf if you want vanilla Arch. Pretty easy journey. You don’t even have to reboot.
- I see 😄well, it makes sense if you think it is worth the time, and you are skilled enough to make the right decisions that endeavour would do for you😇 I for example love AUR but have no time dealing with Arch, that’s why endeavourOS

Fedora Silverblue (atomic GNOME) and Kinoite (atomic KDE) have been solid for both work and gaming. System maintenance is largely seamless and automatic once configured. I still use Arch daily, but only in the terminal (distrobox and containers).

Going AMD is so worth it too, I have zero regrets swapping my RTX 2080s for RX 6800 XTs. Secure boot, Wayland, no fuss updates. Couldn't be happier.

You mentioned needing customization...not sure what you're hoping for there, but the atomic distros allow for plenty of userspace tweaks. It's the system-level stuff, like boot and greeter themes, that require a bit more work to implement. My time is too precious to fuss about that stuff these days.

Thanks for your response. I like to fiddle with things. I'm a bit of a tinkerer and like too customize various parts of my os. Basically more user space stuff. How it looks, buttons, themes, and whatnot. Also able to remove/avoid apps that I don't use. Simple, but unique.

May I ask, why fedora for core system, but arch for distrobox?
- I totally get it as I'm a tinkerer too, but these days I spend most of that energy on webdev, house projects, thrifting/restoring stuff, etc. If only there was more time in a day lol.
  
  There's plenty of freedom to tweak local themes with atomic distros, as your home dir itself is entirely mutable and can be changed to your liking.
  
  As to why Fedora/Arch... I love Arch and have used it daily for almost 20 years. I was an Arch dev once upon a time (Judd/Aaron era), and I designed the logo and web branding in use today. The project means a lot to me.
  
  The inherent benefits of atomic systems caught my attention a couple years ago, and Fedora's implementation won me over.
  
  My hope is that Arch eventually (and officially) adopts a similar approach as these image-based systems become mainstream, at which point I'll happily be the first in line for testing!
I also made a very similar comment, but with uBlue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin) instead.

They are still pretty vanilla, but include a big list of QoL stuff added in, like staged updates, Distrobox, a huge list gaming tweaks in Bazzite, and much more.

It's basically stock Atomic made right!

I've used them for a year now, and they're fantastic!

Just a small heads up for OP: You have to do quite a lot of (advanced) things differently from now on if you choose Atomic. Use containers (Distrobox, etc.) for everything you can, avoid installing stuff on the host if possible, etc.
- I still haven't taken any of the uBlue images for a spin, but I sincerely appreciate what they're doing and Jorge has been the perfect champion for the project.
  
  I like to use upstream as much as possible. Partly to minimize breakage and complexity, but also for the increased security and overall focus of resources on a given project. That said, I have no doubt they're awesome builds and have helped win a lot of folks over to this way of computing!

Anything arch based. :)

Yeah, if going arch based, whya not arch itself?
Would 2nd this suggestion. It is also often possible to swap to using the arch repos after you've got the install setup and you are happy with it on these distros.

Unpopular opinion but for gaming I believe windows it's better than Linux, I use Linux but I'm not a gamer.

Yeah, there's some issues with it, but I'm really tired of windows and don't really want to install 11 or pay for it.

Thanks for your response.
As a Linux only user, I totally agree with your message.

People who downvote you aren't of good faith, are delusional or just dumb.

Linux is better in every single category except ease of use for non-technical users and gaming.

Let's stop with this bandwagon of MS bad, Linux good; Linux is good enough for us to not lie and speak the truth...
- I'm not downvoting, but the fact that kernel malware games don't work is a feature to me. It would be a full time job to keep from installing anything that demands obscene access for no legitimate reason on Windows. "It doesn't work" is way easier.
  
  Pretty much everything else on Steam works without effort.

Have you perused Distro Watch?

Lots of good info & news, and info on just about every distro there is, stuff you've never heard of. Years and years ago this was my introduction to FreeNAS that made a huge difference in my life. You should check it out if you haven't already.

I have forgotten about that site. Thanks.

So you have a lot of suggestions in this thread.

I have an unconventional one:

Red hat.

You can use it for free as long as you register on their website.

The benefit: lots of documentation, a significantly different way of thinking about things (it asks you to define a compliance posture out of the box lol) and a package manager that does a lot of things right.

You said yourself youve been in the game for a while. Why not try being agent smith instead of neo?

No, thanks.

I run ubuntu's server base headless install with a self-curated minimal set of gui packages on top of that (X11, awesome, pulse, thunar) but there's no reason you couldn't install kde with wayland. Building the system yourself gets you really far in the anti-bloatware dept, and the breadth of wiki/google/gpt based around Debian/Ubuntu means you can figure just about any issues out. I do this on a ~$200 eBay random old Dell + a 3050 6gb (slot power only).

For lighter gaming I'll use the Ubuntu PC directly, but for anything heavier I have a win11 PC in the basement that has no other task than to pipe steam over sunshine/moonlight

It is the best of both worlds.

I haven't seen many mentions of Nobara but you can try it out.

It's essentially a gaming-centric version of Fedora. I was in your position a few weeks back and decided upon thing. Latest drivers and packages.

I just installed NixOS and the repeatability of it is pretty neat. I like the idea of having one file that sets up 90% of any pc going forward. Not sure how often I'll use it, but feels neat.

Interesting, the coders use it at my work for easier rolling out the setup. I didn't think about using it as a gaming pc.
- I switched to it also because my debian host got out of date and now it's difficult to upgrade and I'm scared to reinstall it. If it was NixOS I would be able to redo the whole thing in a few minutes. So I'm creating / learning how to create a template to roll it out to my other builds.

Check out Garuda Linux. Comes with a preset catalog of gamer related nonsense on KDE - or - they offer a minimal KDE version as well if you'd rather set things up your way.

I started with the preset one and then switched my machines over to the barebones one once I had a handle on Linux. It's been a smooth ride. Things only break when I break them touching things unnecessarily out of curiosity because I don't know what I'm doing.

Garuda is arch btw

Why not just install arch then?
- Easier install and a cromulent setup out of the box. It's why I went with Endeavour.

If you are an expert, why are you asking pee ons like us?

Things change, the reason linux exists is from communities. I wanted to see what this community was running and get a feel from others. Also, I like experimenting and wanted to see if there's a distro I didn't take into account.

It looks like arch, debian, and gentoo are the main ones I'm looking at.

Each with pros and cons.
- We are not worthy!

I've bounced around alot, have numerous distributions on my Proxmox Hypervisor, but my favorite daily driver, for a really old computer, is ( MX Linux ) I've twice tried other distros to see if I could improve upon the stability and performance, as well as the very convenient availability of a feature rich KDE Desktop environment, and I came back to MX twice now. When I get a new fast computer, I'll switch to Qubes OS, for it's built-in hypervisor and security/privacy and isolation features, but until then, I'll stick with MX.

IMHO, there are excellent reasons why MX ranks highest. I think it's original roots in AntiX with the elimination of systemd has afforded it a substantial advantage over stock-standard Debian, my last daily driver which always had performance issues. With MX, on same hardware, system lock ups are far less frequent when the system is overtaxed.