So been trying out Garuda Linux for a while now (my first distro), but feel ready to try another distro. Therefore looking for a distro that suits my preferred requirements, anyone has any tips?
- Uses Wayland
- Supports flatpak
- ButterFS format
- KDE Plasma
- “Good for gaming”
Note: Got nothing negative about Garuda, I just want to explore the options out there :)—
Try openSUSE Tumbleweed
openSUSE probably has the best out of the box btrfs experience
Fedora KDE, Kinoite, or Nobara could all be of interest to you
I’d throw Bazzite in as well. It’s gaming focused like Nobara but immutable like Kinoite
Who comes up with these names 😅
Don’t laugh, hear me out…
Slackware current (rolling release)
Then switch to LTS version at the next release, which I’m thinking will happen before the end of the yeay.
It checks all of your boxes and will give you a different take on Linux computing.
I think from Garuda to slackware is too large of a leap
I honestly don’t know anything about Garuda. I don’t have much meaningful experience with any distro besides slackware. I’ve had an empty 50gb distrohop partition for months. I was going to give vanilla arch btw a try to see what all the fuss is about, but I haven’t gotten around to it.
Pretty much every distro supports flatpak and butterFS and for most of them, there’s a plasma wayland variant.
If you want to learn a bit about linux in general and the things that you might care about when picking a distro in the future, do a manual arch installation. There’s an install script, but you still need to know exactly what you’re doing. It just does the steps outlined in the installation guide for you.
Arch is also one of the best distros for gaming because it gets new updates first, which is great when game updates break something and your OS already has the fixes for it.
Believe i read that Garuda Linux in fact say that they recommend against installing flatpaks, which is a little ‘turn-off’ for me tbh as I really like flatpaks. But thanks for the tips, i might try a pure arch install.
Well luckily I can’t read, cause I am using flatpaks on Garuda and nobody can stop me. Queue the manic laughter.
I do enjoy thr chaotic aur too tho.
I would recommend Fedora Kionite, or uBlue KDE/ Bazzite. It’s the same as Kionite, but preconfigured with some additional QOL-stuff. Bazzite is the equivalent to Nobara, but also immutable.
I turned into a huge fan for Silverblue (and spins) over the last few weeks.
Especially interesting is the Universal-Blue-project, which offers many “spins” (or to be more precise, new-interpretations and derivates).
You can just install the vanilla Silverblue and then rebase to Kionite, uBlue, Bazzite, and so on. And if you don’t like it, just roll back/ re-rebase without any hazzle or risks. Your user data are separated from the system and don’t need to get copied from your backup like usually.
What you might like:
- Immutable and hard to break. If something breaks (bad update or user fault), roll back. Works even better than Snapper (Tumbleweed) imo, which is pretty much the best BTRFS-implementation. You don’t need to restore it, you just select the image and boot.
- Can be rebased (underlying system swapped out) to anything you want. Switch from KDE to Gnome because it now has a feature you missed? One command, a few minutes waiting time for the download, reboot, and you’ve got a clean “new” system with all your userdata and stuff unchanged!
- No reboot for updates required, they just install in the background and get applied when you boot up your PC the next time.
- Cutting edge, but stable.
- Doesn’t only support Flatpak, but relies on it (at least that’s recommended).
- Install any software you want with Distrobox. Arch, Debian, whatever. Comes pre-installed (uBlue at least) and is an integral part of your workflow if you use the terminal.
- Great KDE implementation.
EndeavorOS or Arch.
A lot of the comments don’t fit your criteria. Everyone is just recommending the distro they like. Which is fine, but they should at least say that.
I personally don’t have a good answer either. Most my experience is in minimal distros that let you built out those components yourself. It may be worth considering that option (in which case, Arch is a natural next step), but you have to explicitly install wayland / flatpak / kde / etc to fit your criteria.
Yeah figured so, think i will go for this option actually :)
That’s awesome! Good luck on your journey and ask if any questions come up!
Arch is great, I’m using Plasma on Wayland and it works really well.
deleted by creator
I love Arch but I’d caution you against hyperbole like this. For example, NixOS has a declarative config for the whole system along with atomic builds that can be rolled back or switched dynamically. Not aware of any way to do any of that in Arch.
deleted by creator
No, because while that lets you use nix to manage some of your packages, it’s still fundamentally limited by being hosted within the imperative Arch install. See for example section 2 in the very link you shared, which talks about starting the nix daemon at boot by messing with your systemd config.
Good to know thanks
I can also attest to this. And apparently kde support for Wayland is supposed to get way better with plasma 6 in February.
I’m looking forward to it, because the only drawback right now is Wayland doesn’t work super well on Nvidia cards.
check out Endeavour OS
I can second Endeavour, it’s probably the easiest entry point into Arch and it can be customized to do all the things in the list.
It runs Plasma really well, and you can get Wayland with KWin working for Plasma as well, but it’s easier to do on AMD and I have an Nvidia card.
Throwing Debian in there. Switched from arch 6 months ago. Still running x11 because xfce doesn’t support wayland yet, but KDE does. I run amd cpu and gpu and have no compatibility issues. And with lutris/bottles/proton games run with minimal issues. Plus most every is based on Debian, so why not just use the original.
I do run a Debian server actually. So I guess i wouldn’t be sailing unfamiliar waters if I were to try it i guess.
That’s what happened to me. Switched all my servers to Debian 12, figured I’d give it a try on desktop, now I tell everyone to try it
deleted by creator
Gentoo 😉
To could to try to distrowatch.com to
Thanks didn’t know about this resource :)
Welcome. It’s pretty good for getting an overview of a given distro. Very well organized. Also if your are into distro hopping for whatever reason, they have a random button somewhere on the site to view a random distro.
Haha that’s fun 😁
Kubuntu with the ubiquity installer will install onto btrfs. Flatpack is easy to add.
Add in system76 scheduler and an up to date kernel like xanmod and youve got 90% of what gaming distros will do.
If you’re using flatpak you don’t have to worry that the host system has old mesa.
This sort of setup is probably trivial to do in arch as well.
With Gentoo, your system can be anything you want it to be ;)
