this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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I'm guessing yes, that you have to make a back up of all your files etc. But I figured I'd ask anyway, just in case.

To anyone who's done it, how do you prepare when you change distro?

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[–] Dort_Owl@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I have played around with my friends steam deck, and messed around with it's desktop mode and quite liked it. That's why I initially was like "Hey maybe that might be a fun little experiment to slap it on a laptop." without thinking about things like "it's built around AMD drivers, Dirt Owl you goober"

Bazzite was another one I was thinking of! That or Pop_OS.

If anyone wants to suggest an OS I'm all ears!

[–] buckykat@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Now is not the right time to try Pop_OS. They've just switched from GNOME to their own desktop environment, which is not really ready to go.

Source: I just switched away from Pop_OS to Fedora about a month ago.

[–] Dort_Owl@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the heads up

[–] ExotiqueMatter@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 1 day ago

My current go to is EndeavourOS, it's very intuitive for an Arch (btw) based distro.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hehehe, hopefully it wasn't too painful a lesson.

Bazzite is very close to SteamOS and the desktop environment is utilitarian but nice. It's very solid.

I think if I was shopping for a new distro I'd take a close look at PikaOS and it seems like it might be up your alley. It appears that it's very good for gaming and it's part of the new Open Gaming Collective initiative so I'd expect that PikaOS is gonna stay on the cutting edge of Linux gaming since there's other really good gaming distros behind the initiative such as Bazzite.

[–] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: