A few beginner questions about the differences between distros.
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As a 20+ year SuSE user, I agree it's a great distro. So much of this is just picking a distro that's decent on the desktop and going with it. I would say there are some wrong choices but there isn't one right choice.
Whatever distro OP picks, they should join the Lemmy/subreddit/forums for that distro and keep an eye on them.
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Always welcome. Sharing the good things is a part of the fun.
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Is it using wayland? I think we were able to install KDE through the software manager, but only the X version.
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No worries fam. And thanks for clarifying! With that clarification, I think I've found what has caused the confusion for me.
Bazzite, even if it's ultimately derived from Fedora, is actually not closely related to ('traditional') Fedora, but instead to Fedora Atomic.
Most of the people that have been recommending Fedora, actually meant the non-Atomic variants. And while this might seem minor, which arguably it is, it is important to be conscious of this distinction.
('Traditional') Fedora behaves a lot like most other distros. Fedora Atomic, instead, introduces a new paradigm. Bazzite goes all-in on this new model and we might even refer to it as next-gen (if you will). Though, it's important to mention that the next-gen part is only true within the context of Fedora. This is because Fedora has been the only distro to have clearly pronounced their ambitions in this direction. They even reiterated this in their Fedora Strategy 2028 and I quote: "Objective: Immutable variants are the majority of Fedora Linux in use". (Note that atomic is a rebranding of immutable)
So, within the context of Fedora, even if I don't see the traditional model being sunset anytime soon, the atomic variants do seem more promising in terms of longevity.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of Fedora Atomic; in particular the uBlue projects, so that includes Bazzite. Therefore, I absolutely welcome you on board for Bazzite. But, it's important to be aware that Bazzite is not representative of what ('traditional') Fedora is (or vice versa); it's not a "flavor".
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It matters as some distros have one maintainer or will offer you something ideological at great sacrifice, but you seem to already know that.
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No, the biggest difference is package manager, community forum in case you meed troubleshooting, default DE (eases troubleshooting), and release type.
There are three big families of distros: Debian / Fedora / Arch.
Any distro that is a derative of either of these three use their package manager.- Drop tuxedo and take a look at endeavourOS. It's arch-based and arch has the best package manager of all. Also KDE is their main DE.
I use Manjaro because I prefer Xfce.
In case you do use EndeavourOS, one warning, DO NOT USE THE ARCH FORUM FOR TROUBLESHOOTING!!
(If you've heard of 'Sheldon Cooper' from the tv-series 'Big Bang theory' or 'Young Sheldon'. This forum is run by a real life version of him and you will get banned there immediately or very quickly, unlike other forums. Rule #1 of many is that any user troubleshooting where the machine uses anything other than Arch, including the closest deratives, gets banned.)
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No. Don't know what HDR is.
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Tinkering with the DE is definitely fun and you should play with it. Be careful though, because the freedom you're allowed also allows you to break things.
But tinkering with the DE isn't the worst thing you could break.
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use fedora, arch, or ubuntu. dont use any of the pointless ones (mint, endeavour, manjaro,...). they are not worth your time. only use wayland (plasma, river, qtile). xorg is not worth your time or sanity.
simplest pick is fedora kde spin. just use that. hdr should work too.
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I second the fedora kde spin. Been using it for years on my work laptops. Hasnt failed me yet.
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Im using cachy, I had to manually partition with gparted once in the install screen after using the usb since auto didnt work but the most recent cachyos dualboot yt video can walk you through that, I can find that for you if you need it, I used ventoy since I wanted to keep using my usb for data.
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I like plasma kde but I dont think most vnc clients support it so remote desktop with a viewer seems out, rustdesk works but you have to manually accept the connection at the computer. Which works for me since I only remote desktop when moving to another room or going to the bathroom and I need to monitor something.
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- The main fundamental differences are the package manager, the way the system is setup (partitons, immutable distros), and possibly software you don't want installed. Aside from that, you can install basically anything on any distro. Some do make it easier than others to install new things though.
- Canonical (Ubuntu and direct spinoffs) and Manjaro are the ones I recommend avoiding, because their marketing and "general sentiment" goes against my opinions of the distros/maintainers. However, switching Linux distros (especially to another one with a similar base) is not nearly as daunting of a task as switching from Windows to Linux. Some corporate distro owners might pull something like advertising, but there's often an easy way out (except with snaps).
- As for the distros you mentioned, Fedora, Mint, and Pop!_OS are all good options. Mint and Pop!_OS are both based on Ubuntu, which could cause issues in the future, but Mint is working on a Linux Mint Debian Edition. Aside from that, my general recommendation is to stay close to upstream. Distros further downstream tend to break more often (think spinoffs of Ubuntu, Arch derivatives, forks of Fedora, etc). There are exceptions to this rule, like when a distro stays close to upstream.
- In recent times, it should all be working okay! We're "in the middle of a long time switch" from X11 to Wayland. Those are protocols for the way applications display to the screen. X11 is lacking features, like HDR, and can have issues with "weird" multimonitor setups. Wayland is being actively developed, multimonitor works fine, and HDR is available for some desktop environments (like KDE or GNOME). Not all distros default (or support) Wayland yet, so if you need HDR, pick a distro with KDE or GNOME as its desktop environment.
- This situation has gotten more complex with Wayland (one of the pain points still being worked on). The features you get partially depend on which DE (or wayland compositor) you choose. Previously on X11, this wasn't the case. For Wayland DEs, KDE is moving relatively fast, with new features nearly every release. GNOME is moving slower, but should cover most people's needs. As for tinkering around with your choice of UI/DE, there's many options available, but KDE offers by far the easiest customization possible (it's all in the settings menu). There's more complex, more customizable options available, but I wouldn't recommend them as a starting point.
- As for nvidia, it has been progressively getting better, but there are still nvidia specific issues that come up from time to time. There's not really much you can do about it, aside from following changelogs and updating when the thing you're running into is fixed.
Now for your list of applications:
- Gaming (through steam) works great! There's definitely still issues, but I'd argue there's not really more issues than on Windows, just different issues. There is one category of games that's still problematic, games with kernel level anticheat. They do not and likely will never play on Linux. Other launchers (EA Play, Ubisoft Connect, Epic) can have their own issues, although there's often fixes/workarounds available rather quickly.
- Firefox works just fine on Linux.
- VLC works great too, although there are other options available that are more modern or better in some ways. It's up to you to decide what to use.
- Spotify works just fine, there's always the website in case nothing else works, but the "app" as a flatpak or even through repos works too.
- Discord has some issues accepting that Linux exists, but have recently started making some changes with that. Most people either use Disocrd in the webbrowser (to prevent too much system access), or run a custom client like Vesktop.
- Godot works great on Linux, I don't have much else to say about it tbh.
- Visual Studio too, it's basically just a webapp. Some integrations might be slightly different (like the terminal), but otherwise stuff "just works".
- Git was quite literally made for Linux first (as a project, but also as a platform to run on).
- Photoshop is going to be difficult to get running, if it works at all. You can certainly try, but it might be a good option to find an alternative for this one.
- Audacity works great
- Davinci Resolve does have a Linux version, but the free version can be picky about codecs. There's always tools to reencode your inputs, but it's not always convenient drag and drop.
- Misc. tinkering is going to be much more fun, as things in Linux ecosystems are often open source. Not only can you mess around with tools that already exist, you can edit them, or even make your own. Some "niche" hardware might give you issues (like iirc the goxlr, or some capture cards).
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Yep I'm pretty sure its wayland! But its only version 5.X
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And here's me using a 15m long HDMI whenever I go to the loungeroom.
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Thank you kindly for the advice. I'll look into cachy. I'm sure I can figure it out.
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Understood, I will continue aware of that distinction.
