Hello, I have been a linux user for close to 6 years now and I have changed my distro quite a bit ( especially in first few months of starting out linux ).
I have wen’t from ubuntu, xubuntu, fedora, peppermint, arch, artix, … in first few years. After that I have settled on arch for close to 2 years. After that long time on arch I decided to try out and test interesting distro’s for at minimum 6 months every year ( and if I didn’t like them I would go to arch back ) until I found something else I could main because I have found a few issues with arch that I could accept but would become annoying from time to time.
Across the two year’s I started this yourney I have used gentoo ( used it for a year but then the lack of a proper retroarch package made me change the distro, plus the 3+ hours compile times when updating specific software ( looking at you qt-webengine and firefox ) ), then I choose to try out nixos which I used for 3/4 months before all that main maintainer debacle and splitting of the team I wen’t back to arch because I didn’t wan’t a distro I’m using falling appart on me.
And here I am now, another year is soon to start and I’m searching for another different type of a distro to try out that does something differently compared to most distros, even willing to try out nixos again if the situation has stabilized now.
My only hard requirement is that the distro need’s to be able to play games ( as in steam and gog ).
Edit: just to clarify, I’m chaning distro’s on a yearly basis for a learning experience and fun.
Try PikaOS.
It’s Debian for gaming. They use the CachyOS kernel (rebranded), BTRFS, the Debian Sid base, and they do the package optimization thing that Cachy does. They also use a lot of the same UI tooling from Nobara, like the welcome screen and icons, and the update GUI is based on but an improvement over the one from Nobara. There’s also the same Kernel Manager and Scheduler selector as what you’d find in Cachy.
Like Arch, it’s a rolling update distro, and they have some kind of automated process that builds/optimizes new packages every day.
It’s admirable what they’re trying to do, and I’m currently considering making a bare-metal switch.
Sadly, it’s for Haswell and higher, I’m on an older Sandy Lake CPU so could not get it to boot and then I saw in their Wiki about the requirements. Yeah, it’s an old PC. (~14 yrs old and as temperamental as a teenager!) :)
Bummer! It’s kinda neat to use, but yeah, they dropped older hardware support (though it’s still fairly young, so maybe it will be a thing in the future).
PikaOS looks cool, never heard of it, but it had me a Debian optimized hardware and software support:). What’s the hyprland version?
Not sure, but it’s supposed to be near-bleeding edge for everything. I couldn’t get the Hyprland version to boot in a VM, so I can’t be sure