check out Endeavour OS
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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I can second Endeavour, it's probably the easiest entry point into Arch and it can be customized to do all the things in the list.
It runs Plasma really well, and you can get Wayland with KWin working for Plasma as well, but it's easier to do on AMD and I have an Nvidia card.
Nobara, it's literally all the things you mentioned above
Neat! ✨
As as hell to install too.
Arch is great, I'm using Plasma on Wayland and it works really well.
Good to know thanks
I can also attest to this. And apparently kde support for Wayland is supposed to get way better with plasma 6 in February.
I'm looking forward to it, because the only drawback right now is Wayland doesn't work super well on Nvidia cards.
What about Arch (BTW)? You can decide exactly what do you want to have there.
Bleeding edge packages are great for gaming, and it supports everything else.
Garuda is based on Arch so it might not fulfill op's desire for real exploration.
You don't really *need* Flatpaks, but you can install them, if you want to.
AUR FTW
Throwing Debian in there. Switched from arch 6 months ago. Still running x11 because xfce doesn’t support wayland yet, but KDE does. I run amd cpu and gpu and have no compatibility issues. And with lutris/bottles/proton games run with minimal issues. Plus most every is based on Debian, so why not just use the original.
To add to this: Debian is pretty conservative in regards to package versions. The current and LTS versions usually have slightly older packages.
If you don’t mind tackling more updates, I suggest Debian Testing. That is the stable development branch for the next major release, currently rocking it with Wayland GNOME on my DELL notebook and very happy with the results.
I've always found testing interesting. On one hand, packages have gone through more testing and usage than with sid, but on the other hand, it could be weeks until some major bug gets fixed. Have you experienced any of the latter?
No, so far no bugs worth mentioning. All works well, apart from more incoming updates than usually on a Debian System.
The problems I ran into were mostly with GNOME and Hotkeys for Apps in Wayland. Like Shift + F12 to open a Terminal does not work reliably when set in the Terminal app, but works well when set in the Gnome Settings as a global Shortcut. But I would file that under annoyance rather then a serious bug.
Im thinking of hopping over Debian soon. I heard i should use steam as a flat pack for best support. Is that true or not?
I do run a Debian server actually. So I guess i wouldn't be sailing unfamiliar waters if I were to try it i guess.
That’s what happened to me. Switched all my servers to Debian 12, figured I’d give it a try on desktop, now I tell everyone to try it
Pretty much every distro supports flatpak and butterFS and for most of them, there's a plasma wayland variant.
If you want to learn a bit about linux in general and the things that you might care about when picking a distro in the future, do a manual arch installation. There's an install script, but you still need to know exactly what you're doing. It just does the steps outlined in the installation guide for you.
Arch is also one of the best distros for gaming because it gets new updates first, which is great when game updates break something and your OS already has the fixes for it.
Believe i read that Garuda Linux in fact say that they recommend against installing flatpaks, which is a little 'turn-off' for me tbh as I really like flatpaks. But thanks for the tips, i might try a pure arch install.
EndeavorOS or Arch.
Gentoo 😉
NixOS, it has some learning curve, but your configuration is stored in git so you can always access any solutions you have employed at any point or any packages you used before
Of course, that also means you can roll back easily and there's also reproducible builds
It is completely different, so worth checking out even as a package manager
Don't laugh, hear me out...
Slackware current (rolling release)
Then switch to LTS version at the next release, which I'm thinking will happen before the end of the yeay.
It checks all of your boxes and will give you a different take on Linux computing.
I would recommend Fedora Kionite, or uBlue KDE/ Bazzite. It's the same as Kionite, but preconfigured with some additional QOL-stuff. Bazzite is the equivalent to Nobara, but also immutable.
I turned into a huge fan for Silverblue (and spins) over the last few weeks.
Especially interesting is the Universal-Blue-project, which offers many "spins" (or to be more precise, new-interpretations and derivates).
You can just install the vanilla Silverblue and then rebase to Kionite, uBlue, Bazzite, and so on. And if you don't like it, just roll back/ re-rebase without any hazzle or risks. Your user data are separated from the system and don't need to get copied from your backup like usually.
What you might like:
- Immutable and hard to break. If something breaks (bad update or user fault), roll back. Works even better than Snapper (Tumbleweed) imo, which is pretty much the best BTRFS-implementation. You don't need to restore it, you just select the image and boot.
- Can be rebased (underlying system swapped out) to anything you want. Switch from KDE to Gnome because it now has a feature you missed? One command, a few minutes waiting time for the download, reboot, and you've got a clean "new" system with all your userdata and stuff unchanged!
- No reboot for updates required, they just install in the background and get applied when you boot up your PC the next time.
- Cutting edge, but stable.
- Doesn't only support Flatpak, but relies on it (at least that's recommended).
- Install any software you want with Distrobox. Arch, Debian, whatever. Comes pre-installed (uBlue at least) and is an integral part of your workflow if you use the terminal.
- Great KDE implementation.
Wayland is more of a DE thing
Sorry, what is DE?
Desktop Environment. MATE, KDE, GNOME, KDE, Xfce, etc.
Ahhhh my bad, should have caught that one 😅
Try Parrot OS, Home edition. Smooth, reliable, does everything well and super easy to add your favourite opensource software. It's flagged as a security distro, but it's actually a highly rated Distro without any of that
To could to try to distrowatch.com to
Thanks didn't know about this resource :)
Welcome. It's pretty good for getting an overview of a given distro. Very well organized. Also if your are into distro hopping for whatever reason, they have a random button somewhere on the site to view a random distro.
Haha that's fun 😁
Kubuntu with the ubiquity installer will install onto btrfs. Flatpack is easy to add.
Add in system76 scheduler and an up to date kernel like xanmod and youve got 90% of what gaming distros will do.
If you're using flatpak you don't have to worry that the host system has old mesa.
This sort of setup is probably trivial to do in arch as well.
Garuda was my first distro too, after it I switched to Endeavouros, I think that endeavouros or arch fill those requirements.
EndeavorOS.
With Gentoo, your system can be anything you want it to be ;)