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
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).
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.