Like, why Valve? I was so close to clearing out all the games I was partway through, now I need to add some demos to my backlog (not many, this Next Fest is kinda weak).

Probably could’ve made it but I haven’t picked a distro. I’m planning on turning my desktop into a dedicated gaming computer and not daily driver, because of the malware risk. I wanted something not finicky, something devs would test on as a known quantity, and preferably something Arch-based like SteamOS.

  • Garuda (Arch-based)
  • Bazzite (Known quantity, immutable, Fedora-based, I don’t trust it for some reason)
  • Nobara (Proton-adjacent distro, Fedora-based)
  • CachyOS (Super fast, Arch-based, presumably finicky?)
  • Windows 7 (Based, unsupported by steam, insecure)

BTW I have an AMD CPU and GPU. Figured I should’ve mentioned that.

  • Metju@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    From your list I ran the following:

    • Bazzite: worked AMAZINGLY (to the point of me double-checking whether I’m getting any updates 😆) until some image screwed up the boot process (some versions I could boot into, some were crapping out right after GRUB). Can recommend if you have a relatively normal hardware configuration (so, as long as your machine is not a Clevo-reseller laptop with NVIDIA GPU and Intel CPU, you should be fine).
      • Addendum: some binaries might not be available for you OOTB due to Bazzite’s root filesystem being immutable. Read their docs on how to run packages / binaries that do require root access (or learn basics of self-hosting, I guess…?).
    • Nobara: FUBAR’d it myself through… Well, being an idiot (had SOME regrets about that 😅); ran into some small issues with GPG keys, but otherwise used it w/o any major problems (see above) for… I think a year with some change? Can wholeheartedly recommend it, as long as you’re somewhat familiar with what RPM packages are and how to work around issues with their signatures (usually - a trivial matter); updates are not as smooth as on Bazzite.
    • CachyOS: my current daily driver. Barring some extremely minor issues in some games (usually solvable through Proton options- and versions fiddling), as was the case with Nobara - can wholeheartedly recommend it (this time, without caveats; despite the memery around Arch, it feels stable; the updates by default are a bit more annoying than on Bazzite though, similar in nature to Nobara: you get a notification “X packages have updates”).