Hello everyone, I need help to decide on a Linux Distribution to settle and finally stop distro hopping. I have quite some experience with Linux(1year Mint, a quarter year Arch, nixos, debian, manjaro, fedora, suse tumbleweed and kalpa…)I have been experimenting for now almost 3 years. Now I finally want to setlle but I just don’t know where. I like Nix’s shell but don’t like installing everything in five steps(with git because my brain can stand neither the dirty tree warning nor leaving out on the git push) and I don’t need the reproducibility. I like rolling so I don’t need to reinstall or do any major update, but even more appealing is low maintenance and stability in the sense of nothing unexpectedly breaking. I’ll use the computer as an daily driver mostly for programming & 3d design, university related work, streaming and also some gaming. Thank you for your answers. #linux #distrohopping
Given the specs of your system, if you want productivity and gaming, I’ll suggest Bazzite. It runs Fedora atomic under the hood so it is extremely stable. It comes with everything you need for gaming. Installing additional software is trivial with flatpaks using Bazaar. Overall it meets all your criteria. It has been my daily driver for a couple of years and I think I’ve found my distro.
Honestly, I’m not really sure if anyone can help you here. Sounds like you’re already quite experienced with linux and know what you’re looking for and what you need.
Most people seeing your requirements would probably say Fedora, as it’s pretty up to date but still stable. I might recommend debian testing if you want slightly more cutting edge.
Frankly, I think you know best what you need and you should see what fits you :)
I would go with fedora, but I don’t want a company behind my distro.
Fedora is upstream of RHEL, not the other way around.
But Red Hat still sponsor it and that might be enough.
sure… but Dell also sponsors the Linux Foundation
I had a similar journey and at some point settled for Debian.
I know, everyone around here will tell you how basic that is and how much program versions lag behind sometimes, but I have come to the conclusion that this really doesn’t bother me on daily use.
The main wow moment was, when the I noticed my system was running for 5 years and nothing ever broke.
Sure, I sometimes miss the AUR or some of the bells and whistles off bleeding edge distros, but in the end I want my main daily driver as a tool to other stuff, not a project to constantly put effort in.
The beauty of Debian is, its reliable AF, everything you got working once stays working, in 99,99% of cases even with a major version change, its the best documented and tested system and it does everything I need and more.
Plus with KDE plasma and all the native programs, like kdeconnect, kdenlive, kget etc I dont miss out on convinience. (Sure I could still use them on other distros, but I like how it is integrated into a good user experience with the option to tweak everything but without the need to do so)
The main down site imho is that some advanced things which may work in a hacky and time consuming way on arch just will not work on Debian at all, but I seldom have such moments and its a small price to pay for a system that’s just won’t brake from where I stand.
everyone around here will tell you how basic that is and how much program versions lag behind sometimes
which mostly show people don’t know they one can add a repository and fix that, my Firefox is 2 days old.
And that repository is flathub. Stable base for the OS, bleeding edge rolling release for the apps
I meant literally the repository https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#From_Mozilla_APT_repository_.28recommended_by_Mozilla.29 not an alternative method. One can add the official source of built packages my Mozilla, keep their Debian distribution otherwise untouched and get the latest.
I did enjoy debian a lot when I used it, I then left it for hyprland and the rolling release though. But debian is definitely something up top of my list right now. Especially because I am now back to KDE Plasma and I’m not planning to change anything about that soon. The only picky point was that it does not support BTRFS with custom subvolumes for timeshift out of the box. But the stability would be a blessing.
debian doesn’t do that ‘out-of-the-box’, but you can do luks and btrfs at install (default partitioning even, just go back and change partition type of root before continuing with install), then ‘adjust’ things to be ‘timeshift compatible’ after install. for some inspiration: https://mutschler.dev/linux/debian-btrfs-trixie/
i’ve used this numerous times, on debian and a couple other distributions.
I’ve settled on CachyOS, using Bazaar for flatpaks (I avoid the AUR). I get a rolling os with frequent updates and more or less secure and verified apps. It’s been a year, no problem so far.
I was avoiding the AUR as well, and I would definetly do so again. Even though I would probably stick with a plain Arch install instead of CachyOS
maybe void? its rolling relase, stable and boring in a good way
I’ve used Ununtu and then Debian for a long time. I was playing with the live distro of the latest SparkyLinux and could imagine using it. Does anyone have opinions about Sparky?
Try MX Linux. I’ve used lots of distros, but I always go back to MX as my daily driver.
Based on Debian. Good mix of non-invasive built-in utilities. Really good GUI package manager. And Yakuake terminal built in.
I like Arch for this. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have recommended it, but it’s been a great decade for me. Rolling distro means not many big changes at any one time. Don’t have to reimage to cleanly install newer release. Arch maintainers are excellent, updates rarely cause problems. Not perfect of course, but you get up-to-date software and an amazing community.
My main conflict point with Arch is the maintenance factor. Whilst my priorities have been the bleeding edge for a long time, by now my thinking has been shifting more towards stability and being able to just use it. That’s what I loved about openSUSE Slowroll, but I don’t want to have a company behind it. And it had a KPM version mismatch resulting in broken nvidia driver.
Why not Debian? If you don’t have any specific reason for choosing something else, that seems like the obvious choice.
debian :)
Ah too bad you didn’t like nix. I was just about to propose a simple home-manager repo which could at least declare your tooling across any distro.
while I don’t understand the git problem, since versioning your OS/tooling is a major feature not a headache, you seem too have found a place with debian so go ahead.
I can only tell you that I’m using CachyOS (Arch) with Wayland and the latest Noctalia, which is extremely customizable. I’m very content. My compositor is Hyprland, but Niri or Mango work, too. Noctalia even technically works with KDE, which I also used for quite some time, but I wouldn’t recommend using it on top of it. Noctalia (Hyprland) has been a standard installation option in the CachyOS .iso ever since August 2026.
And it has problems; try changing the color theme and it keeps requesting your password. Some stuff is seriously messed up in CachyOS’s Noctalia+Hyprland setup, which I tried in the past month. I’m gonna try Pop!_OS+COSMIC sometime soon; hopefully that’ll rock, or else I’ll revert to the tried-&-true Mint Cinnamon.
It doesn’t do that. My color theme changes dynamically with my background. But even manual changes don’t require that. Did you enable polkit in the control center? Are you running Noctalia 5 or newer?
Only when I want to update my greeter theme alongside everything else, I get polkit requests asking for my password. But I also got noctalia-greeter after having had installed another greeter. So maybe that messed it up. Anyway, you can disable auto theme update for the greeter. Or use a different greeter.
I’m sure there are problems still, but it only just got implemented last month (Noctalia greeter is also super new). I think we can expect fixes. Maybe your particular issue has already been fixed. For some tools I’m using I’m getting daily updates by now, so last month is like ages ago in terms of updates. Not necessarily true for Noctalia, though.
I did like Mint Cinnamon, as well. Pop!_OS I haven’t tried yet. I might hop a little on my second machine. But for now I’m happy with my heavily customized Noctalia setup on my main machine. What else did you find to be messed up?
I had never heard of polkit. I had left NixOS+Noctalia+Hyprland well over a month ago. It was continual permission-access popups that were clearly bugs and that it shouldn’t have had. Hopefully it’s better by now but I just like COSMIC more overall regardless.
Gentoo.
To be honest, it sounds like you’ve tried the prime candidates. You probably know better than us which one fits you best. Ultimately, I also think that it doesn’t make that much of a difference for an advanced user. You can probably get almost any distro to do what you want.
I use void btw. No systemd (your mileage may vary depending on the desktop environment) and have not embraced slop, at least yet.
