Hey everyone! I'm finally fed up with Win11 and the bullshit that comes with it for the PC it's on.
It's being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich, and gaming PC for the living room.
I'm currently in the process of backing up all my important info and am doing research on which distro to use.
I don't mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key. I don't want to have to go in and update it every week... I want this one to work with minimal maintenance on my part.
I'd likely update it a few times a year, knowing me.
A few hardware specs:
MSI mobo (I've learned that UEFI can be a pain), 10600k, 2070 gpu, and will have a pool of 3x8tb drives that I would like to have in raid5 (or something similar) for storage (movies, TV shows, and Immich libraries), the OS will have its own drive, and I have a separate SSD that I have been using to store programs, games, yml's for docker, and other such things that get accessed more frequently, but aren't crucial if lost.
I've kinda narrowed it down to either Bazzite or CachyOS.
I've heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down, which I'm not a fan of, but CachyOS has features I will likely never touch (schedulers, kernels, etc...).
I don't want an upkeep heavy OS. I'm moving away from windows for that reason. Win11 has been a nightmare for me with constant reboots and things not loading up until after I log in. Not to mention driver conflicts and all the other BS that's come with it.
So... What say the hive mind? Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work? Or do I have it all wrong with my perception of both?
Thanks!
Ps: this will be my first full commit to Linux. I've dabbled in the past and am no stranger to CLI... So this will likely be a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux. Go easy on me lol
Try something conventional, with low maintenance and large adoption, and tailored for the home user, like as Linux Mint for instance.
Take your time there to learn the basics and get acquainted with the new environment.
Cachy is nice, and flashy and cool, but is a rolling release, sometimes it gets broken by some package update (...systemd), and it might need some tweaking to get a temp fix while the repo updates align to stability again. The good thing about cachy is that being based on Arch you're gonna fully benefit from Arch wiki which is nothing short of double amazing.
Bazzite too is very nice too for gaming setups, but I had a bad experience on the underlying Fedora atomic distro on which I was installing an old printer which required software was not in the repo and which were offered only as .deb packages (made for Debian), which required a socially unacceptable amount of time of tinkering. That means with Bazzite you're all set if your hw is very streamlined, but if you're using something peculiar you are on your own.
If you really want the latest updates for gaming, but also benefit from the large adoption of a debian based distro you can also try PikaOS, which is Debian testing release optimized for gaming experience, think about it like a Cachy based on Debian rather than Arch
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pikaos
just keep in mind that in comparison to Mint it surely be less tested, and that anyway even with cachy vs mint in gaming tests the advantages of cachy are practically negligible, and the main difference in perf is given by gfx driver quality, in which specific case nvidia linux drivers are historically the black sheep of the story
Pika is friggen amazing. I started my Linux journey with Bazzite but kept having weird issues and switched to pika. Shit just works and doesn’t get in your way.