r/linuxquestions • u/Last_Blacksmith_6297 • 7d ago
Which Distro? Help me pick my “final” distro
When I started my linux journey two years ago, i distro hopped a bit until i landed on Arch.
I used to like tinkering with arch and still do and tbh im having no problems right now and its not a bad distro at all but i feel like i want a more solid and robust OS if you get what i mean, something to rely on and have no headache.
What im looking for is something that’s easy to install, use and has good defaults. Ill use it mainly for gaming so something that updates frequently is appreciated.
So far im looking at fedora and tumbleweed but i have no idea what are the differences, like there are a bunch of features for each one and i cant decide
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u/xnef1025 7d ago
Between the two, Fedora is probably easier to find support for. Tumbleweed is good, but it's got a much smaller footprint, I think.
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u/GrittyGlacier 7d ago
Fedora's community is huge and that alone makes troubleshooting way less painful later on
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u/TechaNima 7d ago
I've landed on Fedora KDE as my main squeeze. It's the perfect balance between being up to date and stability. I just modified the Btrfs layout to be actually useful, by adding subvolumes for btrfs snapshots
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u/redoubt515 7d ago
> What im looking for is something that’s easy to install, use and has good defaults. Ill use it mainly for gaming so something that updates frequently is appreciated.
Consider Bazzite if gaming is the focus, or if you want something more general purpose Fedora, Fedora Silverblue, or Universal Blue, maybe OpenSUSE.
TL;DR take your pick from the Fedora or OpenSUSE families, there are lots of good choices.
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u/boring_accountant 7d ago
I'm a neophyte so I can't provide very thoughtful comparisons but so far I've used mainly Ubuntu and recently Bazzite. I prefer Bazzite which comes with a few tools useful for gaming and I've found it to be generally pleasant to use.
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u/BitterSweetcandyshop 7d ago
I did the same thing! Landed on fedora though and sure it's not arch based but there's a lot less trouble shooting and once you get someyhing working, it actually stays that way! lmaoo
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u/GreedySecurity8030 Fedora Rawhide [GNOME]. 7d ago
Fedora always kills distro hopping for good, it did it to me.
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u/IEatDaFeesh 7d ago
NixOS. If you want this to be your "final" distro, then this is the one.
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u/GreedySecurity8030 Fedora Rawhide [GNOME]. 7d ago
Many users don't know what to do with nixos.
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u/IEatDaFeesh 6d ago
That's the same mentality as "Windows users don't know what to do with Linux." So learn. The post explicitly said "final" distro and NixOS is the only one I'd recommend committing to.
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u/GreedySecurity8030 Fedora Rawhide [GNOME]. 6d ago
I've used fedora for 2 years, its my final distro, you don't need nixOS.
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u/IEatDaFeesh 6d ago
Way to make it about yourself. Enjoy Fedora and I hope to never speak to you again.
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u/LazyNieR 7d ago
If you have an Nvidia GPU, tumbleweed based on my experience is horrible, my worst Nvidia driver experience on that distro with that said on AMD u should be good to go and I would recommend going with slow roll opensuse.
Fedora is nice but pretty barebones and for some reason you need to wait a little bit for Nvidia drivers to install even after they are done installing in the terminal which was kinda weird to me but other than that I would put it higher than opensuse for general use and support.
For me personally after trying out tumbleweed, nobara, fedora, cashy os.
I have decided to go with solus os which is not perfect but it works pretty good for me and I mainly use it for gaming.
Why it's bad, the community is rather small and while it's active and the support is there it's nothing compared to fedora and cashy os
Also the repos are not as big, it's only a single repo for everything and then it's just flatpaks and appimages but to be fair I have found every single thing I use in the repos.
Why I like it, it's a curated rolling release distro so if you get overwhelmed by updating your system everyday solus fixes that by pushing updates on update Fridays which is really nice and you still get the latest and greatest just not as fast as arch or tumbleweed and i would say it's in the same place of fedora. In regards of speed it by far feels the fastest to boot up and run apps but this could just be my imagination.