Manjaro or Pop!_OS for (Nvidia) gaming on Steam?

Bazzite is Fedora os-tree immutable distro. It allows installing RPMs but it’s not nearly as flexible as traditional distros. That being said, you can still do basically everything, but not always straightforward. If you need a C/C++ dev env with toolchain and what not, you better of using something like Distrobox or your custom Podman/Docker containers for that.

The answer found here should give my general thoughts.

But, with embedded dev, I'd argue that both Aurora and Bluefin (with their respective DX: (i.e. development friendly) variants) should make more sense.

In your case it's still an excellent choice.

Though, other opinionated images by uBlue (like e.g. Aurora and Bluefin) do deserve a mention. I'm on Bluefin (through secureblue to be more precise) as I desired more hardening than what Fedora offers by default.

The excellent part is also that it's possible to rebase to another branch without reinstalling. So, let's say you're actually interested in experiencing these different images without going through the installation process over and over again. Then, you simple enter the following command:

rpm-ostree rebase ...

With ... being replaced by whatever is required for the image and/or branch you're interested in. Then, simply reboot, (pro-tip: make a new user account and through the new user account) experience the other image. Rinse and repeat to your heart's content.

I wanted to know from OP why they're considering Manjaro.

Because it’s an excellent distribution which is also in the top of the Steam Survey (alongside Arch, Ubuntu, Mint and PopOS) (and Flatpak, and Steam Deck’s SteamOS).

I'd argue it's to Arch what Ubuntu is to Debian. Do with that whatever you will.

Btw, ProtonDB's numbers show that Manjaro is losing lots of ground over the years. I won't deny that the negativity around it plays a significant role in this. However, to me, if it's already installed on your device, your experience with it is simply more important than whatever's said about it. Therefore, I'd argue that Manjaro's ever decreasing market share has to be linked to users being ever so upset of its vision, direction and mishaps.

It’s a rolling distro but mitigates the risks of bleeding edge with a curated stable branch, offers LTS kernels going back to 4.19 but you can choose LTS or newer versions or RT patches, it does not force you to switch kernel version if you don’t want to, has visual management tools for packages, kernel management and driver installation, does a great job installing drivers during install, comes with extra safety features (update rollback built-in if you use BTRFS for root), Steam works great, you can use AUR and Flatpak etc.

All of that is cool and all, but trust is what it's all about. And honestly, I think someone should get a diagnose for Stockholm syndrome if they're still putting up with Manjaro after all it has done.

Just because it's wildly used it doesn't mean it's the best, otherwise you'd be suggesting OP to install Windows 10.

Manjaro has several legit criticism. Maybe they're not important to you, but they are still legit and relevant points to make. Personally, I ended up going with an Arch derivative that uses the official arch repos. Everything else you like in Manjaro can be easily installed.

allows automatic fixes to be applied to a broken driver without requiring any manual intervention from its user.

If you get an update, and after that update your system doesnt graphically boot anymore or something, you can use sudo ostree admin pin 1 and rpm-ostree rollback to switch back to the working version and make sure it never disappears.

Then you can wait for a next update (still no good update info mechanism afaik) to fix it, try it, unpin the saved version and go on.

But there is no automatic repair voodoo anywhere, on any distro. That driver is proprietary, only NVIDIA can fix it. rpmfusion packages it to work on Fedora, Fedora Atomic helps making this very unstable mechanism more failsafe.

But you are still relying on 3 entities (NVIDIA, rpmfusion, Fedora, (uBlue)), with NVIDIA not caring about Linux that much, instead of 1 (Fedora) like with AMD, where drivers are FOSS and can be adapted for Fedora specifically.

AMD does not opensource a lot, and ROCM or the entire amdgpu-pro driver is a similar situation. But at least the basics work.

The tree refers to the Linux kernel Git repo. On Linux normally all drivers are in there.

I think that is a pretty crazy concept, but it kinda gives trust and if it is in there is will likely not break.

Out of tree means the driver is not compiled in (like BTRFS on RHEL distros) or cannot even be included as it is proprietary or else (NVIDIA, Displaylink, Virtualbox).

These drivers are added locally using kmods OR akmods, I dont know the difference and never used it.

uBlue adds some drivers during the build process which is pretty cool. So even though it is out of tree, it gets centrally included and if it breaks you dont get the update.

I run amd and still pick pop. Ubuntu compatibility with out of the box working experience, with no snaps, no canonical package repos, optimised scheduler for gaming performance, QA team testing every system update like kernel and mesa and excellent developers that even provide support on lemmy? Can't go wrong with pop