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Need distro advice (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello, gorgeous community!

My friend, a generally non-technical person is looking for a good gaming distro. He has been daily driving Windows and OS X before, his main motivation for switching Linux is to streamline his contributions to a game development project we have, that is largely Linux-based (we use Nix for dev environments and build automation).

The only Linux distro I've ever used for gaming is SteamOS, and all my other experience is in the Nix/Arch domain, so I am not sure what to recommend to my friend.

As I mentioned, the only hard requirement we have is a possibility to sustainably use Nix package manager with experimental functions (command, flakes), - and I am willing to help my friend setting it all up. But I also would like him to be able to use the OS for gaming whilst experiencing only the expected and acceptable amounts of pain.

So far we have Nobara and Chimera on our radar. Is there something you can recommend? Any advice in general would be helpful, thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I would recommend Bazzite or Aurora/ Bluefin. Bluefin is Gnome, and Aurora is KDE.

Both Bazzite and Bluefin are very similar. Bazzite is gaming focused, and the other one is more general purpose, but you can use them interchangeably and also rebase from one to the other.

They are the poster childs of the uBlue project, which uses, modifies and redistributes Fedora Silverblue images.

They both are part of the Fedora Atomic family, which makes them nearly indestructible, convenient and secure.

They focus a lot on containerised workflows, e.g. Distrobox, Flatpak, Homebrew, and, as you mentioned, Nix. They all come pre-installed, and if they don't work ootb (e.g. Nix), they are just one ujust command away.

I have used both over the past year and I couldn't be more happy. Give them a try!