[malbs]

to give you a single data point, I've finally committed to linux on my desktop machine at home (I posted in another comment on this thread regarding my sim setup, thats another issue), but on the desktop machine, I installed steam, proton, downloaded a few games from my library, and they just worked on install, no stuffing around at all, no searching the web for fixes to get it going. It's probably been 6 years since I tried it, and last time I tried pretty much every game needed _something_) to be done to get it working. The level of technical knowledge required to get it going now is minimal, so maybe 2026 is the year of linux

the one caveat was, ubuntu 24.04 LTS still didn't recognise my xbox wireless controller out of the box, and I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience, but something that would be beyond one of my daughtrs or wife. I've since moved back to debian though but already armed with that knowledge so it wasn't any kind of surprise.

next step will be to migrate my work machine, but that one is more difficult because the primary dev is in Delphi, so it'll probably be a case of linux on the hardware, and virtualbox running a win10 VM to do compilations, the other parts of the job are basically all o/s independent python dev, so no problem there.. although I will miss toad for oracle.

[Gigachad]

There is value in the gaming specific distros since they already include all the stuff like controller drivers. I installed Bazzite on my desktop which I have plugged in to the TV and it's been every bit as seamless as the steamdeck. It boots up direct in to steam big picture mode and I can do everything with my xbox controller.

Bazzite is an immutible os which is absolutely the future of linux. Your install will never break on updates since rather than a normal update migration process, it simply boots the next version of the OS image, which if it doesn't work will just revert back to the old image where you can wait for the bug to be fixed to update again.

[MiddleEndian]

One of the straight-up benefits of TV gaming that Bazzite (and presumably any KDE environment, but it's been a bit since I used another) has over Windows is that you can label your Bluetooth devices. I have blue controller, pink controller, white controller, damaged white controller. 90% of my gaming is local multiplayer games and I switch between an actual PS5 and PC, so this is super useful.

Can't do it in Windows 11 for some reason. No option to label them in the new settings app and the option to label them in the old control panel does not work. They all got saved as "Dualsense Controller" and you just had to guess which one you were reconnecting.

[fullstop]

I've been using an immutable Linux for the last year or so, and it's gone quite well, but not without pain points.

There's a lot of stuff that I do which does not have a flatpak or package baked in. To get around this, I've been using distrobox to run these things in Ubuntu containers. So I will do "distrobox enter sdr" to have a terminal open up in that environment. You can export applications so that they show up in the applications list. It really takes some experience to shift your mindset, but it was worth it for me.

[MiddleEndian]

I agree that development sometimes takes extra steps, but honestly setting up dev environments almost always takes too many steps anyway lol. Overall it's worth it for the stability.

[fyredge]

> I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience,

Call me nitpicky, but this is why Linux desktop is not ready yet. If anything, I'm a firm believer that SteamOS will be Linux Desktop

[malbs]

I agree, but I'm sure Bazzite/CachySteamOS all have support for them on boot.

[SquareWheel]

Bazzite KDE picked up my 8BitDo controller immediately, with no prior configuration. I didn't even have to manually pair the Bluetooth. I was very impressed.

[dalmo3]

> CachySteamOS

Where can I find more information on that? I use CachyOS but never heard of that. Googling didn't find a single result (surprisingly, not even your comment)

[LtdJorge]

I think OP missed a slash

[malbs]

yeah, sorry

[amarant]

Yeah I think for the not-so-tech-savvy gamer, there are better distros than Ubuntu. Ubuntu(and Debian) tend to lag behind the cutting edge a bit too. For such users I'd probably recommend fedora (or one of it's variants) or just straight up steamOS

[cwnyth]

As a Fedora user, I would actually recommend Ubuntu for gamers new to Linux, just because companies that offer Linux builds tend to only support Ubuntu. It's a bit more work comparatively to get to smooth sailing on Fedora. I think that work is worth it, of course, but new users might beg to differ.

[malbs]

I tried cachy, but I decided I hate the kde plasma environment, I should have chosen some other window manager but wanted to try the recommended one

there is also something to be said, negatively, for the number of distros now, cambrian explosion since the good old days of slack, deb, redhat, suse lol

[HDBaseT]

I honestly believe one of the main, highly supported Distros like:

Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Nix, etc are all better choices than Catchy, Manjaro, Bazzite or whatever else niche distro exists.

I commonly find myself running into weird issues that I would of never run into otherwise. Bazzite for example by default, opens Steam on boot. This caused my games drives to not be mapped in Steam. (I assume Steam somehow booted before my drives were properly mapped) I helped my friend for hours troubleshooting his fstab config, rebooting, etc, but then realized it was just a default that he never set.

He quit Linux because of this (and some other minor gripes) and I don't think the gaming distros do much to properly help.

[mcv]

Doesn't Cachy support all of the DEs? Use it to try them all. (I don't know how CachyOS handles it; EndeavourOS lets you pick the DE on login.

[malbs]

yeah, on install you select a window manager, I didn't bother trying any others, just opted to go to Debian instead