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
I would definitely give Bazzite a try. If you are looking for stability and a set and forget OS. If you don't like it you could always try something else.
If you are looking for something to tinker with and change things like manually changing packages or messing with services you probably want a more traditional "non-atomic" os
Don't let talk of the filesystem being "read only" scare you. You can still save files to your desktop and documents and stuff in your user folder.
In windows terms it's more like imagine
C:/windowsbeing read-only so you can't break your system. You can still write files to other parts of the drive, but it prevents you from messing up your install (some people like this added layer or stability, some don't like it because it makes tinkering with your system harder)An atomic OS is kinda like a phone OS, in the sense that every version of iOS 26 comes with the same version of Safari and the same libraries. It makes it so any bugs are reproducible and easier for the developers to track down. Packages are pinned to the OS version. (For example all installs of Bazzite 20260101 will include Nvidia drivers 590.44.01-1)
In a more traditional Linux distro because packages can be updated to whatever version if you install Ubuntu the version of Nvidia drivers is not tied to the OS version. You could have an install of Ubuntu 25.10 and could have a completely different Nvidia driver version from someone else on Ubuntu 25.10. This could make bugs harder to trace because you could have the same OS version but different packages. Think of this like even though you and a friend could both have (Windows 11 25H2 installed you could have different drivers installed)
As for updating Bazzite generally auto updates once a week in the background. It requires 0 manual intervention and keeps your packages and drivers up to date. You can turn this off if you wanted to. Since it uses a "image" based approach (again imagine upgrading from iOS 26 -> 26.1) it is able to save the previous version of the OS. So if the upgrade broke something you can roll your system back to a known good state with a single command.
If you are looking for something that's set and forget I would definitely give it a try.
If you want to tinker with it and figure out how Linux works I would probably try arch or something