CachyOS, Mint LDME, Nobara, Bazzite. Based on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Fedora. If you want stable, just scratch Arch from that list.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2026-01-10, 21:16:

CachyOS, Mint LDME, Nobara, Bazzite. Based on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Fedora. If you want stable, just scratch Arch from that list.

Why has Bazzite seen a higher "promotion" lately compared to, say, elementaryOS or Gentoo or even CentOS Stream

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2026-01-10, 21:30:

Why has Bazzite seen a higher "promotion" lately compared to, say, elementaryOS or Gentoo or even CentOS Stream

It's a gaming focused distro.

For people who want to play games without too much hassle, Bazzite is the one to go for.

Until a realistic general release of SteamOS, Bazzite is probably the best way to get Steam (and some other launchers, Lutris etc) up and running with minimal fuss.

Honestly, Flatpak mostly solves this problem. So I just use Debian + flatpak

I was in a similar boat, and I'd say the biggest selection of software would be ArchLinux's AUR. The downside is that while ArchLinux itself has been pretty solid in my experience, AUR packages do break routinely after updates.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2026-01-10, 21:30:

Why has Bazzite seen a higher "promotion" lately compared to, say, elementaryOS or Gentoo or even CentOS Stream

I haven't used Bazzite, but a lot of the modern PC community is focused on gaming (to the point of being obnoxious). I haven't heard anyone talk about Gentoo in a long time, and I thought CentOS was more of a commercial server-focused distro.

I think there are two definitions of stability. There's the Debian "use old versions of packages with security patches only" definition, and there's the "doesn't crash" definition. At this point, I'm not too sure that desktop Linux is "doesn't crash" stable anymore, but it was in the past.

The Arch AUR and Ubuntu PPAs are probably the largest collections of weird third-party stuff (including drivers - for example, Hauppauge releases their drivers as PPAs, and then they get unofficially ported to the AUR). If you don't need third-party drivers like that, Flatpak and AppImages are good for software and not distro-specific.

PopOS gets high marks from users, especially the new Cosmic desktop. Personally, I’m fine with Debian, but I’ve been using Linux on and off since the 90s.

Yeah PopOS, that's another that rings the gaming name.

Another one I hear a lot is Zorin OS for the fact it looks a lot like Win, but I don't know it's other aspects

I use xubuntu on my big pc, but use bazzite on my gpdwin4.

Bazzite's immutable FS is a pita, imo. I only use it on my win4 because steamos isnt an option. I have to run a script to reconfigure zram swap, because the maintainer does not reference a user writable conf for that. (Grumble)

Iam using Cachyos my self on my living room computer.

Tried Bazzite, but was to closed to me with using the terminal. Maybe great for gaming only. Not for gaming + desktop use.

For pre-2010 machines, look at "Puppy".

I've been using Void Linux for the past 6 years now without a problem. It's a rolling release distro with it's own package manager and uses "runit" for the init process.

They have a policy of only packaging stable, non breaking (as in try to avoid ABI incompatibility and SONAME bumps) releases though if a major library has a breaking change then all packages depending on it are updated and in case of breakage, patches written to resolve the break if possible.

The base system install is very barebones like Arch, so if you're used to that kind of initial setup hurdle there's nothing really wrong with the distro. The package system is described here and is comparable to BSD "ports system".

I actually run my system with several locally custom built packages without problems. Manual intervention obviously needed in the event of SONAME changes but nothing impossible to fix.

I guess I should step on the Arch train this time