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

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2026-01-10, 21:05:

I am looking for one that's sufficient for a personal user. Cherry on top, stable and a lot of available packages.

"Stable" in the context of Linux distributions means stable API (in case you're not already aware). Debian is one such example, the APIs of libraries and the kernel are held stable for the life of that version, and often that means the applications as well. Ubuntu LTS, and its downstream Linux Mint, is another example though they make exceptions for the desktop version where HWE (hardware enablement) allows the kernel and Mesa to update roughly every 6 months (shortly after the next non-LTS version of Ubuntu). RHEL (and its upstream CentOS Stream) is yet another example though in this case it has a franken-kernel where the version number is the same but subsystems are backported from newer kernels (those that matter to paying enterprise customers); also desktop-related components like Mesa, GNOME, and some desktop applications are updated every 6 months.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2026-01-11, 18:58:

I guess I should step on the Arch train this time

Arch is almost at the other end of "stable" where basically it's not, everything and anything is more or less upgraded as upstream updates and there are no fixed releases for the distribution.

Somewhere in between are those that are updated every 6 months like non-LTS Ubuntu and Fedora.

I suggest making a list of which of the "lots of available packages" you need and see which distribution(s) have them (and how often they're updated).

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-11, 03:48:

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

I'd set that date quite a bit further back, I still run Fedora KDE on a 2008 AM2+-based system (Athlon 64 X2, 4GB RAM, 780G iGPU) which was my previously daily desktop; I basically just kept updating the installation it's had on it. Recently I installed Fedora 43 LXQt on a similar vintage ThinkPad T400 (Core 2 Duo P8600, 3GB RAM, GMA X4500MHD iGPU, 160GB HDD), takes about a minute to boot (vs. XP which boots in half the time) but is pretty usable after that, if a little sluggish compared to much newer machines.

jtchip wrote:

Arch is almost at the other end of "stable" where basically it's not, everything and anything is more or less upgraded as upstre […]
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BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2026-01-11, 18:58:

I guess I should step on the Arch train this time

Arch is almost at the other end of "stable" where basically it's not, everything and anything is more or less upgraded as upstream updates and there are no fixed releases for the distribution.

Somewhere in between are those that are updated every 6 months like non-LTS Ubuntu and Fedora.

I suggest making a list of which of the "lots of available packages" you need and see which distribution(s) have them (and how often they're updated).

That's true, I contradicted my own statement. Since I can't settle on something Debian based. I decided to choose Arch since it's getting rolled in for gaming OSes, and it gives the feeling that things will be rolled in fast, and more often than not, stable. How far that belief goes, I don't know.

I am still open to choose something that suits me better, and I might prefer something mutable (still) yet knowing things can break. I wish to learn things on the way.

Talking of repositories, I don't know where to find them correctly. I needed a 32bit library, which I couldn't find for Debian but it existed for Arch although 2yrs old

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2026-01-12, 02:46:

Talking of repositories, I don't know where to find them correctly. I needed a 32bit library, which I couldn't find for Debian but it existed for Arch although 2yrs old

https://repology.org/ and https://pkgs.org/ are 2 such sites with lists of packages by distribution.

jtchip wrote on 2026-01-12, 03:01:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2026-01-12, 02:46:

Talking of repositories, I don't know where to find them correctly. I needed a 32bit library, which I couldn't find for Debian but it existed for Arch although 2yrs old

https://repology.org/ and https://pkgs.org/ are 2 such sites with lists of packages by distribution.

For instance, I am looking for a 32-bit version of alsa oss. In Ubuntu, I couldn't get one with apt and in the 2 sites, I managed to find alsa for both Arch and Ubuntu. However, I can't seem to find in Repology if the binary is 32-bit supported (i386,i586,i686..) or only amd64. However in pkgs I found a "lib32-alsa-oss-1.1.8-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst" for Arch Linux Multilib, which might be the file I need?

I am quite new to this, so a reassurance would help

If it's a very old package, then you can probably get it in an older release.

Debian has a package searcher on their homepage.

https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

Looks like you want osspd-alsa i386?

(OSS proxy daemon over ALSA. Gives an OSS interface with 'newer' ALSA backend. Apparently also supports PulseAudio backend.)

https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=all& … ords=osspd-alsa

Manual installation with dpkg is possible, but caveat emptor.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-01-13, 18:36:

If it's a very old package, then you can probably get it in an older release. […]
Show full quote

If it's a very old package, then you can probably get it in an older release.

Debian has a package searcher on their homepage.

https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

Looks like you want osspd-alsa i386?

(OSS proxy daemon over ALSA. Gives an OSS interface with 'newer' ALSA backend. Apparently also supports PulseAudio backend.)

https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=all& … ords=osspd-alsa

Manual installation with dpkg is possible, but caveat emptor.

The application I was trying to run was looking for libaoss.so. The tar file I linked has 1 so file so I am assuming that's the correct one.

I don't think it's osspd, and still I don't know what this libaoss is other than that it relates to audio