cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19744473

I’m going to be building a new computer soon for myself. (Going AMD for the first time, since intel microcode issue.)

I would say I’m an expert or advanced user, as been using pcs for 25 years and set up arch and slackware in the past. I have tried many distros and would like some feedback.

I mainly use my pc for gaming. I want something customizable, KDE ish, and without bloatware. A good wiki is a plus.

I think that i may end up with arch… is it better for gaming since it’s bleeding edge and isn’t steamos built off it?

Side question is distro chooser accurate?

      • Breadhax0r@lemmy.world
        8·
        2 months ago

        I tried bazzite and nobara which are both the big gaming distros. Bazzite worked the best but I had a ton of just weird little issues with stuff randomly not working unless I restarted it. I don’t have much to say about nobara because I couldn’t actually get steam to work for some reason.

        I went back to mint and honestly it’s been the smoothest and easiest to use distro, plus it has a larger user base so it’s easier to find help.

        • SolarPunker@slrpnk.net
          1·
          2 months ago

          Nobara is very good for middle user that just want a ready-to-game distro; Bazzite is best for noobs, thanks to immutability; for an experienced user there are no reasons to not use Arch.

  • CrypticCoffee@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    Rolling distro, up to date kernel, very good KDE support, stable?

    OpenSuse Tumbleweed has got you covered.

    Though this weird bloat fetish usually leads to Arch…

    • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      2 months ago

      On the other side: point-release distro, LTS kernel, also very good KDE support, practically unbreakable?

      Debian to the rescue.

      This one won’t lead to Arch.

    • Crazyslinkz@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      2 months ago

      Understood, not really a fetish, more of I don’t want extra stuff that I don’t want to use or take space for no reason.

      I want to use every drop of my system for performance, maybe that’s from my “old person” in me.

      • CrypticCoffee@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Non-running software doesn’t affect performance as it isn’t anywhere near your RAM or CPU. What often people perceive of bloat is frequently software dependencies that are likely to be used over the course of the OS’s usage.

        Often I have found bloat free setups end up taking hours of digging out dependencies on multiple occasions. Life is too short. I have things to build.

        • Crazyslinkz@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          2 months ago

          It still takes space on the drive. It takes an icon on the start menu.

          And then there’s that little devil in me that I don’t want to send feedback back to servers of what I do with my system.

          Maybe I’m paranoid or maybe I just want to squeeze all the pure power (and space) I can. It’s like an old hot rod, there’s no radio; there’s no heated seats; it’s made to go fast and have fun.

          • CrypticCoffee@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            It does take space on the hard drive. Can easily remove desktop shortcuts. Telemetry on open source software doesn’t usually happen without consent and you can turn it off (Firefox for example).

            This is more of a feeling type thing. If it makes you feel good though, go ahead.

  • SolarPunker@slrpnk.net
    8·
    2 months ago

    Arch. Bazzite/Nobara are for noobs (in a positive way, don’t get me wrong). Gaming is in spot where you want stability but also a rolling release, since we have daily improvements on essential packages; as an experienced user you can use Arch for that; consider also even Valve is on it with the Steam Deck (Arch-based).

  • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
    5·
    2 months ago

    Gentoo lets you trim the fat even more by adjusting your packages at build-time. It has great KDE support. It comes with LTS kernel, but lets you opt for newer ones.

    • Crazyslinkz@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      Hmmm… thanks for the response, I like how it’s more built for your system since you compile it locally.

      • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        2 months ago

        The USE flags (feature compilation option) can be a bit tricky to manage, but they’ve tidied up the defaults quite a bit.

        The one thing that might still be hard to get right is having all the media codec you need. I wish they’d include it in the default so I didn’t have to fine tune it myself, but well, that’s just part of the fun, and I already got my battle-tested set, so I got nothing to complain.

  • missingno@fedia.io
    3·
    2 months ago

    Anything popular enough that you can easily google any issues you need to troubleshoot. Beyond that it truly doesn’t matter.

    • Scratch@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      My first and current distro is Pop_OS and it’s been a bit of a pain in the ass. I need to run terminal commands to get Bluetooth to work, Rocksmith is a lost cause, my display signal dies randomly, forcing a restart.

      Thinking about Bazzite, but read this article and maybe Ubuntu is just easier, for now?

      (Nvidia gpu giving me pause over which will support it better)