5d ago

Linux distro recommendations

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!

57 comments

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.

Ubuntu/Canonical gets flak for telemetry & Snap packages, despite PrivacyTools.io recommending it. Criticism stems from perceived compromises on privacy & a "walled garden" feel, despite being a better option than Windows/macOS. It's just a clash between open-source ideals & pragmatic realities.
- Off-topic, but AFAIK the team responsible for PrivacyTools.io's content has moved to PrivacyGuides.org.
  PrivacyTools is now (mostly) solely run by its original owner and its content has ceased to be reliable ever since the likes of NordVPN and Surfshark have appeared at the top of their VPN recommendations.
  While I wouldn't argue that PrivacyGuides is perfect, it's undoubtedly better than the alternative. And thus unsurprisingly the actual (spiritual) successor of (what used to be) PrivacyTools.
  FWIW, PrivacyGuides doesn't recommend Ubuntu.
  P.S. while it doesn't tackle as many topics as PrivacyGuides does, privsec.dev offers comprehensive guides on the topics it does. FWIW, they also used to be in the PrivacyGuides team (and perhaps even in PrivacyTools).
  
  Interesting point. It's surprising how much nuance there is in the world of Linux. PrivacyGuides and Privsec rightly highlight some legitimate concerns regarding Debian's approach. The expectation that package maintainers should backport security patches rather than simply updating to the latest upstream version is a rather peculiar quirk.

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.

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).
- 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?
- 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 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.
You're a power user who has enough technical knowledge to deal with the issues of running bleeding edge.
I'd say Arch, even the manual install isn't too complicated once you've done it a few times and then you'll have access to the latest and greatest packages.
Occasionally this results in some weird bugs. For example, currently, when waking from suspend my HDMI outputs fail to connect until I change the display properties, so I wrote a bash script to toggle the refresh rate and bound that to a hotkey so I can recover without a display. I'm sure in a day or two a system update will fix it and, if not, I know how to locate the problem (in the system log: kernel: nvidia-modeset: WARNING: GPU:0: HDMI FRL link training failed. ) and report it on the appropriate bug tracker.
If this doesn't sound intimidating then you'll be fine as an Arch user.

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.

Fedora is still good for now, but that's the same for any distro. Any dev can pull shady shit. I really want to check out Nobara, which is Fedora based and designed for gaming. I believe it's developed and maintained by GloriousEggroll, who we all know from GE-Proton.
But I'm too happy with vanilla Arch and NixOS.

I'd just go Tumbleweed

Doesn't seem like anyone mentioned it yet, so I'm gonna chime in: Bluefin-DX by Universalblue might be worth a look.
It's a special developer version of their already interesting and rock solid atomic distro, meaning it's not rly meant that you do much with the OS part of the filesystem (I'd recommend you read up on it, since I can't explain it that well) It has VSCode preinstalled (you can replace it with VSCodium tho with a simple command IIRC) and allows you to spin up virtually endless Linux environments where you install your additional programmes that aren't available as a Flatpak (you can still use them in the CLI, DW)
- I'm on bazzite which I believe is like a sibling or derivative of bluefin. All based on atomic fedora. Atomic means the base system is immutable, which should help with stability. As mentioned elsewhere, for bleeding edge you use flatpak or distrobox. Its been a pleasure to use, I'm very happy.

Someone else mentioned it, but another vote for Aurora-dx (-dx for the developer version). It'll give you the KDE experience without having to worry about your underlying system, leaving you time to work on software dev in a containerized environment of your choosing. Arch is great if you want to customize and tinker with everything, but given your parameters, I think not worrying about that bit will make your life easier as you focus on what's more important to you. As long as you reboot your computer from time to time, you'll always have the latest version and can rollback easily if something goes wrong.
And as is tradition with Linux, it's not like you have to use whatever you decide forever. Distro hopping is a time-honored tradition!

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.

Give NixOS a look-see. Takes a different approach to package management, but for an engineer that want's customization abilities it's probably one of the top choices. I don't usually recommend this for newbies, but if you're an engineer it won't be too bad and simply using it may give you more skills to add to your repertoire when looking for work.
A lot of people put time into maintaining their dotfiles, but NixOS takes that idea to the infrastructure-as-code level when you use it as your daily driver.
ETA: in terms of gaming, with Wine/Proton + Steam/Lutris/Heroic pretty much any distro will be workable

You sound like a perfect fit for Arch.
- But arch seems so overwhelming in comparison to something user friendly like fedora :D And everytime I read something about arch, people complain about its complexity and their tendency to easily break things. I don't know if I'm ready for that.
  
  It's not all that different. Give it a try.
  
  You can try void. It is something between arch and traditional distros.

I'm not very knowledgeable about or experienced with Linux yet, but from everything that I've read, I have the impression that Arch is the one that's oriented to power users, not OpenSUSE. I've seen OpenSUSE suggested as one of the more beginner-friendly distros, apparently one of the, if not the most stable rolling release distros, and supposedly has one of the best KDE integrations. That's the one I'm leaning towards adopting as my first Linux distro to really use seriously to replace Windows on desktop (as opposed to just playing around with it). I am also considering the other flavors of OpenSUSE besides Tumbleweed: Slowroll and Leap, in that order.
I agree with your feeling that going with one of the source distros that other distros use as a base is a better bet, and have seen some reviewers say as much. As far as I know, the big 4 in that regard are Arch, Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE. Most everything else is apparently either a derivative of one of those or a niche independent distro.

It all comes down to how "techie," you are. If you want something safe, than Debian is fine. All you have to do is not use Debian Stable and use Debian Sid. There are also many other Debian based distros that are excellent for new comers. Many are likely to recommend you Mint, which is a fine distro for people how are new to Linux.
OpenSUSE is pretty good if you are into rolling releases. Fedora is excellent if you want to be building your own apps from source and know how to use the proper flags when building. However, if you want something that is a bit faster and simpler to use, then I would suggest something else.
If you want something independent and you say that you know your way around computers then either Arch or something Arch based, so you are not going full on KISS. In the end, it all comes down to how much of a DIY system do you want and much of a system you want to just work. Do you wan it be rock solid or with a higher chance of breakage.
Personally if you want to go pure, then go Debian Sid, it is a good mix of rock solid along with some newer packages and it is way more stable --statically speaking, or sort of-- than Ach. Again, this is anecdotal as you will have a number of people say that they had been on Arch for a while without any issues. So, people's mileage may carry.
On one of my old machines, I have been testing Q4OS and Mabox, which are Debian based and Arch based respectably and they have been border line perfect for years. Q4OS uses KDE out of the box. Mabox uses Openbox, so it might not be something you are looking for. Both are very light on resources which you can use for running all the apps you want.
However if you have copious amounts of RAM and you want something a little more known, then check out Mint, or NixOS. The latter requires a bit of a learning curve but if you already work with computers, and have no issue reading documentation then you won't find it difficult.

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.
Nowadays, with Flatpaks, so many software providing binaries, etc. this does not matter so much. If you want, you can even use something like Distrobox to have containers for tools using whatever bleeding edge distro you want, but still have a solid stable underpinning.
Debian also has more stuff than you would expect in backports. The main sticking point is yes, you'll be stuck in Debian 12's KDE until 13 comes out. But that might be sufficient for you?
(You could also use Debian Testing, which is basically a rolling release. But I'd consider stable first.)

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).

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?

If arch seems interesting to you, you can ease setup using arch-install, and you have access to its magnificent wiki and aur that arch provides.
Otherwise fedora is pretty much on bleeding edge and has all the niceties too
Also Slackware current if you want kiss but without dependency resolution and stuff.
- This is a totally real question that I am hoping you can educate me on.
  Why would you want to avoid dependency resolution?
  
  So, in slackware you get dependency resolution via sbopkg which installs any third party tool, but it's done by maintaining a list of dependencies for each thing in a file, parsing that and then creating a DAG (directed acyclic graph) as needed. It keeps the system simple and manageable as most tools if not all are bash scripts.
  Cons include having to manage it yourself and needing to install the full base to ensure you've got all the assumed packages installed.
  There is no right and wrong answer tbh kinda just a matter of taste.
  The thing that I like is that it since most third party packages are built from source I can force it to compile on my single stack of tools. I don't need to have multiple versions of a library installed cause a package needed different version of something. Things stay fairly coherent. And maintaining a mirror becomes easy as you only need a couple of GB for a release compared to the terabytes needed for an Ubuntu as you'll need all the various packages available to resolve all possible dependencies. This to me is doesn't make sense from a maintenance PoV. Also your system doesn't do things you're not aware of.
  Tho arch kinda does something similar by offloading third party packages to the aur. Where things are compiled by source mostly
  Here's some thoughts from someone in the community https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:package_and_dependency_management_shouldn_t_put_you_off_slackware
  I hope my word salad makes sense!

How about CachyOS?

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 archinstall Then 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 ?
  
  In my experience, just using both the stable and LTS (Long Term Support) versions of the kernel avoids 99% of issues.
  In the last two years, I have had drivers fail after an update twice. In one case, my laptop WiFi no longer worked (potentially huge problem as it does not have Ethernet). In another case, the webcam stopped working and I need it everyday. In both cases, I booted into the LTS kernel and was back up and running in under two minutes. In both cases, I tried the more up-to-date kernel a week or two later and found that things were working again. If I only had the one kernel, both of these would have been major issues. With two, they were nothing.
  Out-of-date software versions cause more issues in my experience than too new versions cause on Arch. As does not having to work around software missing from the repos. In practice, I find Arch very stable and reliable.
  
  yep, btrfs snapshots. If you find setting that up difficult, Garuda OS comes with btrfs set up out of the box.

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.

I've been recommending Fedora.

Just because nobody's mentioned them yet and they are worth trying out: Solus & Void. Both are independent and rolling distributions.

Similar thoughts and after hopping a bit I'm liking Solus really well. It's rolling release but what they call "curated" rolling release. They take a little bit of time to iron stuff out. There's a weekly update cycle.
The installation is through live ISO and was pretty easy, took only a few minutes. They have a Plasma ISO too, since you mentioned wanting KDE.
As a plus, I've not once used the command prompt in the past couple of months since I installed (GNOME first and then since the last week, KDE). I'm not averse to commands but I do want something that I can recommend to my less techy anti-capitalist friends. My games have all been working fine too.
Edit to add: I think they've also mentioned that their aim is for a personal desktop.

I've pretty much run every distro under the sun. From arch to Gentoo to Debian and all of the middle ones. I then landed on endeavour OS and used it for around 3 years. It was great until it broke.
Every couple of months something breaks and I can never fix it. Nothing fixes it, even a timeshift restore. I just had to reinstall, and that was painful. I've then set out on a new hunt.
I'm now experimenting with Nobara OS as it is a better Fedora and comes with some goodies for gaming. It's been ok so far besides this occasional random freezing that I can't figure out. It goes away by either rebooting or switching to a tty and back to GUI. I'm still experimenting with it. If it works well, I'll keep it, if not, my next experiment will be BazziteOS. I did try mint for a little bit, too, and liked it, but I wanted to explore more.
- I cannot imagine what happened that required having to re-install EOS.
  
  To be honest, I don't remember exactly, but I remember that I couldn't ever log into my desktop anymore. I was stuck on the login screen. I tried x11 since I was on Wayland, and it just wouldn't let me log back in. It was like the plasma session dies then spits me back into the lock screen. I can log in in a tty, but not through GUI. I remember reinstalling the whole plasma desktop with everything and I was still not able to log in. It was like it got possessed or something. lol. I want to go back so badly, but I'm scared. I'm at a point of my life where I just want my computer to work. I don't want to run around fixing things, hence why I'm even thinking of an immutable distro.

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 was about to suggest Debian and Gnome. 😂
- Well thank you, but in the moment I think no thank you 😂

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.

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.

57 comments