Yeah honestly, I set up a Windows SD card for dual booting, and I’ve used it maybe once. SteamOS is where it’s at for the steam deck. Premium.

Thanks for the recommendation! I’m excited to give these distros a try!

Thanks for the input! Glad it’s working for you!

There are some great recommendations on this thread, I’m excited to try them out!

Yeah I’ve been using a steam deck since it’s release, Linux gaming is definitely a million times better than days of yore.

Thanks for the Debian recommendation! Not a bad idea.

Thanks for the recommendations! Lots of Fedora in here, I feel bad for never having checked it out.

Another vote for Mint! LMDE was on my radar too, thanks!

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Fedora in this thread. Never tried it, definitely gonna spin one up! Thanks!

Nice! Thanks for the recommendation!

That’s quite the glowing recommendation for nixOS!

Definitely a learning curve to installation, but I like the idea of config once/cry once, then in the future you’d never have to do it again. I’m just wondering how true that is in practice? Like, I configure it once, but over the course of a few years I install a bunch of stuff. Do I have to keep my config file manually up to date? Or once I’m up and running does this happen automatically?

I’m not opposed to a fair amount of cli legwork to things up and running, if the payoff is as good as you say.

I’m definitely curious about this distro, thanks!

To streamline my request for help, I omitted some details, and combined some of my experiences.

My desktop has a 3060ti in it, but I haven’t actually run Linux on that lately, besides some live environments.

Most of my testing has been on a few year old thinkcenter with integrated graphics, Intel CPU. That’s where I was having problems with jittering and mouse capture. Actually that’s still installed, but it’s doing server things so I’m disinclined to mess with it at the moment.

I have an older PC, again with integrated graphics, that I’ve installed Mint on and have been playing with it.

Ultimately I plan to more or less replace my desktop with a new framework 13 I’ve got in the mail. That has an AMD iGPU.

I kind of disregarded the idea of DE swapping, because I did it in the past and screwed stuff up. Maybe it’s easier these days?

Thanks for the /home suggestion!

Thanks for the breakdown! Bookmarking this.

In what way is it a pain? Because of the immutability? See that’s what I was worried about, but was assured that ostree could be used somehow? I still haven’t had time to look into it

Arch is in the running, I guess, I just didn’t know what I wanted and had a bad experience with arch. But it’s been explained that while arch CAN be highly customized, it can also be very stable on a pre-customized distro.

Thanks for the input! Manjaro is on the list to try out!

Thanks!

Crazy, I can’t believe I’ve never looked into Fedora before. Lots of love for it here. I’ll try it out! Thanks!

Noted! Thanks!

I’ll have to look into this, thanks!

Thanks for the recommendations! I’ve gotten a lot for bazzite, and a few for CachyOS.

I’ll be honest bazzite is looking better and better, but with CachyOS at least I could say I use arch btw lol

Another vote for basic Debian. Thanks!

That’s good to know! I’m definitely sick of Windows instability and constant bloated updates.