Hey everyone! I’m finally fed up with Win11 and the bullshit that comes with it for the PC it’s on.
It’s being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich, and gaming PC for the living room.
I’m currently in the process of backing up all my important info and am doing research on which distro to use.
I don’t mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key. I don’t want to have to go in and update it every week… I want this one to work with minimal maintenance on my part.
I’d likely update it a few times a year, knowing me.
A few hardware specs:
MSI mobo (I’ve learned that UEFI can be a pain), 10600k, 2070 gpu, and will have a pool of 3x8tb drives that I would like to have in raid5 (or something similar) for storage (movies, TV shows, and Immich libraries), the OS will have its own drive, and I have a separate SSD that I have been using to store programs, games, yml’s for docker, and other such things that get accessed more frequently, but aren’t crucial if lost.
I’ve kinda narrowed it down to either Bazzite or CachyOS.
I’ve heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down, which I’m not a fan of, but CachyOS has features I will likely never touch (schedulers, kernels, etc…).
I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS. I’m moving away from windows for that reason. Win11 has been a nightmare for me with constant reboots and things not loading up until after I log in. Not to mention driver conflicts and all the other BS that’s come with it.
So… What say the hive mind? Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work? Or do I have it all wrong with my perception of both?
Thanks!
Ps: this will be my first full commit to Linux. I’ve dabbled in the past and am no stranger to CLI… So this will likely be a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux. Go easy on me lol
Check out Nobara. It is based on Fedora, comes out of the box with everything Bazzite has for gaming (Steam, gamepad/joystick support, etc…) but is not an immutable distro and not as heavily locked down.
I’ve been a Windows systems admin professionally for 20+ years and although I’ve managed a few Linux systems professionally, at home I’ve mainly used Debian for tinkering, running Docker, and dedicated servers for me and my friends. My personal PCs have always been Windows based.
I really wanted to use a Debian based distro, because its what I have most familiarity with, but there just isn’t one that isn’t Ubuntu based or updated frequently enough for the gaming I like to do. I’m sticking to Deb for my servers. Fedora is just as mature and reliable, and gives me the degree of control I want over system config without being cumbersome. I have some pretty specific network config and software requirements that necessitated some tinkering in /etc and .conf files that Bazzite was not going to let me do.
I also wanted a PC that just worked, minimal tinkering. I do not want to spend my gaming time trying to troubleshoot obscure Linux issues. My personal PC use is like 80% gaming. I have a good virtual infra home lab setup. A Synology NAS that holds my music/movies/file archives.
Nobara setup was a snap. Ditto installing Discord. Both webcam and headset were auto detected. I installed a few flatpak apps including VLC, Putty, Firefox (preferred browser). VLC was able to stream video/audio from my NAS without any additional changes.
Fired up Steam, installed Elite Dangerous, plugged in a T16000 HOTAS joystick and done. Was playing that same night. Ditto any games using my Xbone gamepad.
The only fishing I have had to do online for remedies and workarounds have been related to some small 3rd party apps I use to support games like Elite Dangerous. Most additional software I’ve installed via Flatpak, which is amazing. However, by design flatpak apps run in sandboxed environments and are not given full/free access to the file system. (this is a great thing). I’ve added Flatseal to give me a GUI for modifying flatpak app permissions when needed. (Discord, for example, needed additional permissions to allow me to copy/paste screenshots/pics into chat)
I created a separate partition for installed games. Most guides offering help on installed games assume games/apps are installed or looking in your /home folder, but for me it was on a separate volume, which required permissions tweaking or just looking in a different path.
I cut over during the holiday break. Overall, the transition has been seamless and painless.
Do you know about piping? It changed everything for me back then. People do the weirdest complicated things that are mostly a few piped commands. One command if you master awk 🤣 but let’s not go there.
Just make a partition and install a distro: Try Bazzite(fedora); don’t like it? Try Garuda(arch).
I just use fedora and install the stuff myself, which is probably similar to how Windows works since there’s no “windows with steam and Nvidia drivers”
Don’t use Debian on the gaming PC(or any “stable” or “lts” distro), everything will be out of date and Gaming on Linux typically needs the latest packages.
The big thing you probably will care about is the Desktop Environment; which is what you’ll actually see when using the PC. There’s Gnome, KDE and more, each distro will typically let you use pic which one to use.
Given your requirements, absolutely I’d also recommend against Bazzite and CachyOS, at least today.
Debian stable. Enable security updates by
unattended-upgradesand you can basically go over a year without manually updating (aside from the occasional reboot to activate the newer kernel).Then if you’re not already into containers, I propose learning about rootless Podman and using that to run your arr stack services. For example using docker-compose and/or systemd services.
If you don’t mind going a little bit more of the beaten track, then I also encourage you to check out Alpine Linux. Their wiki explains how to install it with a read-only root filesystem which it sounds like you’d like. But since it’s early and a commitment, maybe save this adventure for later.
Arch has a like 10x more update churn than Debian or sth and is not stable in the same sense.
For a more hands-on system, or something offline, Arch is still great.
I have neither used Bazzite nor CachyOS. You’re sure you don’t want to try Linux Mint? It’s extremely stable Linux for your grandma. Seriously, my dad’s laptops run Mint, and have for the last 5-6 years. When he gets a new laptop, I go over and install Mint for him (and he doesn’t know what Linux even means, he keeps calling LibreOffice “linux”). He asks me for help with his Windows desktop all the time (which he needs for certain software), but linux “just works” (his words). My son’s gaming computer and our house TV (which is an oldish Dell All-In-One that both my son and my wife need to be able to use) also run Mint.
For me, work computers that need to be stable run Mint, work computers that need to be secure run Qubes and servers run Debian.
I second this; Mint is great if you want to set up once and get going.
seconding this, my gf struggles with tech, i put her laptop on linux mint and shes had a much easier time using it
My 70 + year old mother uses pop OS and has a degoogled phone that she uses signal to measage. Switching cost is a lie… the tech bros always switching things up so much anyways… Whats is stable and reliable anyways. This world is a shit storm of corpo tech bro nonsense. meh
Linux mint is pretty chill! Debian I think? Its got all the bells and whistles. When I set it up for the first time it kinda reminded me of windows. I also like redshift which does not work on pop OS which I use now as a daily driver.
No, Mint is Ubuntu.
LMDE is Debian.
Ubuntu is also Debian under the hood.
Yes, but it’s more up-to-date and Ubuntu has Canonical tentacles all over it.
That last bit is why I run LMDE. Ubuntu was great for a while (started using it 2010-ish), but I don’t like the direction Canonical is going these days.
Most (all?) of the bad Canonical stuff is removed in Linux Mint. It’s the reason for its existence.
You do get the good stuff though like Ubuntu’s better hardware support and PPAs etc that Debian doesn’t have.
I know.
I was just replying that Ubuntu and Debian are different.
Have you found an alternative way to use your house TV with anything other than mouse and keyboard? (Like a remote or something?)
There are remotes for PC. I have one right now, and they are pretty cheap in Amazon. One nice thing is that they can also do limited control of the TV (through IR, obv).
One thing to keep in mind is that most identity not all of these remotes have a gyro mouse.
I haven’t tried.
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If you game, Bazzite with KDE is damn near perfect. I’ve been running it for a year and never had a problem making it do what I want it to do.
I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS.
Bazzite is immutable, updates are easy and not bothersome, and if for any reason one ever breaks something, a single command (sudo rpm-ostree rollback), you go back to the previous state, easy peasy.
Okay, aside from all the distro advice, I have some practical install advice.
There’s a program called Ventoy. At ventoy.net
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and Ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them
Most distros these days have a live CD option, meaning you can run the distro and test how it feels without actually committing to an install.
So, take all the distro options here and throw them all on a thumb drive with ventoy installed, then you can simply boot into each one.
Now, my personal fav distro is called Garuda. It excells at gaming, and can do everything you want, but will put a red blinking icon in the task bar if you don’t update every week or so.
Garuda is Arch based.
I don’t believe Ventoy is safe. Too much dodgy stuff.
https://feddit.online/post/605807#post_replies
Ventoy is great. I have a dedicated 128GB flash drive with a variety of ISOs, including various live and full-install Linux distros, Windows (LTSC only + MAS scripts), and diagnostics (Hirens, memtest86, etc).
Incredibly handy to have on-hand.
Good advise, but 0/10; you forgot your ‘btw’ after mentioning arch :p
Eh, Garuda has its own repositories and packages, so it’s Arch, but not Arch Arch if that makes sense.
I know what ya meant, just pulling your leg.
Its like how i use linux mint. Its ubuntu, technically, but has its own repos
Bazzite is good for gaming and general computing. If you want to run servers or tinker with the OS at all it becomes annoying and impractical.
Fedora is stable, with modern packages, and is what Bazzite is based off of. I’d probably recommend that.
Debian is rock-solid stable, but lacks newer packages. It’s great for a server, not so great for gaming and general computing.
Debian. It’s rock solid. You don’t need anything flashy or new fangled if you’re just building a home server.
I wouldn’t suggest bazzite or cachyos for a newbie.
I don’t mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key
I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS
Yeah I wouldn’t recommend a rolling release distro like cachy then lol. Debian or it’s derivatives would be better for something low maintenance that you don’t need to update frequently
I also wouldn’t recommend bazzite, just cause im not a fan of immutable distros as they feel too locked down for me, but I’ve never attempted to set up a jellyfin on one, so someone else with more experience would provide a more concrete answer for your purposes there
Yea, I want something stable and an arch based distro don’t really go together.
One of the Debian family is best for that.
Arch based distros can be very stable these days.
People forget that SteamOS on the Steam Deck is Arch based.
what’s the point of using arch if you won’t be going any heavy tinkering or using bleeding edge shit? debian is the objectively correct choice here
If they’re going to be using docker and gaming, they probably do want to be tinkering though while so having stability.
Hence, Arch. That’s why Valve went with it too.
If they won’t be doing gaming stuff though, then yeah Debian is the better choice.
There’s a lot of well meaning but not too well informed advice in here. Since one of your goals is gaming, stay away from Mint. It can be made to work (well), but you have to get there. It’s basically the recommendation people gave for decades, but there have been massive improvements through many distros while mint just kinda stood still. There’s still some things they do rather well though.
CachyOS will do what you want it to, and it is what I switched to like 8 months ago. It isn’t maintenance heavy at all if you don’t want it to be. I think I had to intervene once since I started using it, but that intervention was necessary or it wouldn’t have booted after updates. The official updater will tell you when that’s the case, as it lists critical news like that. Otherwise it just works, and it’s pre-configured and optimized for gaming. Under the hood it’s basically Arch, just without the fiddling of getting it to a usable state. Because of that they’re is also an enormous amount of information out there (Arch wiki) on how to do stuff.
Bazzite is a stark contrast in many ways as it’s an immutable distro, but also pre-configured and optimized (maybe not quite as much as CachyOS). It will also do what you want just fine. It is relatively “safe” due to the immutability, and updates are much rarer (and by definition always whole system updates). I don’t know exactly how you’d run your services, but assuming they are dockerized or similar that should be just fine, but please do some searching before if it does contain what you need in the base image (presumably docker and docker compose).
Since one of your goals is gaming, stay away from Mint. It can be made to work (well), but you have to get there.
Mint works just fine for gaming. I run LMDE 6, all you really have to do is install Steam with Proton. I also run RPCS3 without any odd configuration outside of game-specific items (which you would have to do on Windows as well so it’s a moot point).
My experience as well. So far I’ve run ~20 games through steam and never even needed protondb advice as it just worked.
I play multiple Windows-only games on Steam, including BeamNG.Drive, which hilariously runs even better on Linux than it ever did on Windows. It maintains 60+ FPS on High settings at 1440P without even trying.
I was running everything through Docker, so that will be a must. Jellyfin was on its own executable, but that was because something with transcoding, I think, wasn’t working with docker. I don’t remember now what the problem was, but apparently the issue didn’t exist in the Linux docker version. It was isolated to windows.
If it’s not in the base image, there will be a way to add it, yea?
Somewhere else in the thread someone mentioned Bazzite not being ideal for servers, but I’m still parsing through all the replies, so I’m unsure how accurate that is.
Docker and Bazzite are not plug-and-play. That being said, bazzite comes with podman, and podman can create a docker environment.
But…I am not an expert here by any means. Do not take this as a green light to just go ahead and pick bazzite. Bazzite is my daily driver and I use podman to run arch and Ubuntu CLI programs as well as an ollama local llm server, but I know NOTHING about docker, I just have seen the docs and thought I would share.
These Linux Docker images may be of use to you for setup.
On Linux, running Jellyfin through docker with GPU acceleration works fine, yes. But you need some options/flags to pass access to the GPU to the inside of the container. Guides and/or docker tutorials exist and should contain that, as that’s basically the default setup these days.
As for Bazzite and Docker (I just checked), no it isn’t part of the base image and you can’t easily install it. That’s the downside of an immutable distro. I think podman is available, which is compatible and FOSS, but there may be caveats to using that. There is a bazzite version called bazzite-dx intended for developers, so that one would probably work fine for you out of the box. There shouldn’t be any real downside to using that compared to the mainline image, apart from being slightly larger cause all dev tools are installed, but do check that. My practical experience with Bazzite is limited.
My real recommendation is: just try it. Slap in a small/cheap SSD (~20 bucks) instead of whatever you got in there now, install CachyOS and try it out. Then install Bazzite and try it out. By “Try it out” I do mean setting up a copy of or a test-install of your required services (arr stack, jellyfin, …), to see if everything is as you’d expect. Possibly install more distros to try them out, then make up your mind and actually fully migrate, or if it doesn’t work out go back to your currently installed drive. Installing a linux distro takes like 10 minutes these days, then play around with however long you need. Since you already have it narrowed down to only 2 options anyway, that is most likely the best solution.
I switched to Bazzite last week, and also run Jellyfin. It’s been a pain. Hours of troubleshooting. I’m still having an issue with metadata, but I think that’s actually just Jellyfin. That said, most of the issues were easy to fix, just hard to research. SELinux is a pain and messes up Jellyfin.
Sudo Setenforce 0
And it works like a charm. Doing volume labeling does not work. Other than that, you just need to adjust to using podman instead of docker.
Oh, and gaming just works. STALKER 2 runs better on Bazzite for me than it did on Win10.
Used both CachyOS and Bazzite. Bazzite works great for Steam Deck like device but for desktop daily driving CachyOS with Cosmic DE never got issues and I was distro hoping a lot before.
Between those two I would recommend Bazzite, but I think I would actually recommend Bazzite’s parent distro, Fedora, instead. Mainly just because I don’t know how Bazzite would handle server software.
Also to note, updating Linux is significantly quicker and less painful than updating Windows
The issue with Fedora for OP is its update frequency might annoy them. Bazzite doing automatic updates might feel more “set it and forget it” for them.
I also would expect server software to be fine on bazzite, just run it in docker containers (which you should be doing for hosting services anyway)
No joke. It feels like I’m constantly catching up with Fedora. And I am a person who finds system upgrades recreational. It is not a good pick for OP.
I’ve been running Fedora on one of my computers fore years. It’s pretty good and stable, but there are lots of updates. I haven’t really bothered to tweak or update that much, which seems to be a bad combination for Fedora. I think this distro requires more maintenance than I’m willing to give it.
For example, updates used to work for a while, until one day they just didn’t any more. I fixed that, and things were ok for a little while, until another update broke the GUI again. Eventually, I just got tired of troubleshooting a basic thing like the update GUI, and stopped fixing it every year. I just ignored the GUI, and installed updates through the terminal instead. I just can’t be bothered to fix the GUI more often than maybe once every 5 years.
Eventually, I realized I don’t have the time or energy to do that much admin work for a computer that doesn’t matter that much. Had it been my primary computer, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but in this case it was. Recently, I switched to Debian. Let’s see how well that system handles the level of neglect I’ll be subjecting it to.
Besides, that computer doesn’t even require the latest versions, so why bother with Fedora. Debian should be new enough for my needs, and installing updates like few times a year should be fine.
my first full commit to Linux
a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux.
Linux Mint is a pretty good stepping stone into the world of Linux. Or Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), for Ubuntu/Canonical free experience. Especially if you prefer low maintenance distribution. Debian has pretty long release cycles, and LMDE, being based on it, will share similar release cycles.
I cannot recommend Bazzite enough. It is amazing, and it’s based on Fedora, which is also amazing. I’ve used Arch based distros before, and they can be really cool, but they break once in a while, especially if you haven’t updated them in ages.
I’ve turned on a PC with Fedora after a year and a half, and just updated as usual, and it all worked. Bazzite is even easier, because updating simply means downloading a new base image and updating your Flatpaks. Easy peasy, and very quick.
To get Docker, to run your servers, in Bazzite, you can use
ujust:https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/ujust/
Or switch your base image to Bazzite DX:
