I decided to try Fedora Kinoite for my gaming machine (to have something with less “maybe not maintained one day stuff” out of the box and a long term community of maintenance), and have been happy.
If we take the post as truth (it's not clear to me whether we can), then Bazzite will get iffy kernel updates that will particularly break handhelds. But desktop will be more stable and you could even turn off automatic updates for 6months and see how things look after.
I think Bazzite has a very smooth experience for Windows gaming and even if you decide that you don't like it or that the distro really is falling apart, you'll have gotten the best Linux-gaming experience and can evaluate other distros more clearly.
Replacing something that's SOTA with something that still uses X11 and years old software isn't it (it makes Debian Stable look modern).
Imagine going from a modern OS to one that doesn't have touchpad gestures in 2026. Yeah there's workarounds but having to config that isn't a good user experience.
dismalaf: I definitely don’t care about gestures on my desktop computer.
This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.
Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.
This is very incorrect. There's been far more for 35+ years
* apt/.deb
* yum(dnf)/.rpm
* Tarballs
* Ports trees
* Flatpak
* Snap
* Etc, etc, etc
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.
These were designed to solve different problems.
PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.
Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).
Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc
Snap happened in 2014
Flatpak in 2015
So you've got about 10 years of catch-up ;)
You don't understand. This won't be "sorted out", this is a feature.
Maybe it's just not for you, and that's ok.
Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.
Dozens of SUSE
Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.
So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.
Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.
It's also a fucking system daemon that runs in the background. Avoid.
Flatpak is available on every distro.
Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.
Mint won't even boot for me because it doesn't support my year old GPU (9070 XT). That's a huge miss when someone is looking at an OS primarily for gaming.
For gaming specifically, I've heard good things about Nobara (dev is a RedHatter, though it's his personal project) and CachyOS.
If you have normal hardware, something like like Fedora Kinoite should be mostly equivalent.
might need to hold off on that, as much as it pains me, with all the weird & sloppy updates windows is pushing out.