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
Try something conventional, with low maintenance and large adoption, and tailored for the home user, like as Linux Mint for instance.
Take your time there to learn the basics and get acquainted with the new environment.Cachy is nice, and flashy and cool, but is a rolling release, sometimes it gets broken by some package update (…systemd), and it might need some tweaking to get a temp fix while the repo updates align to stability again. The good thing about cachy is that being based on Arch you’re gonna fully benefit from Arch wiki which is nothing short of double amazing.
Bazzite too is very nice too for gaming setups, but I had a bad experience on the underlying Fedora atomic distro on which I was installing an old printer which required software was not in the repo and which were offered only as .deb packages (made for Debian), which required a socially unacceptable amount of time of tinkering. That means with Bazzite you’re all set if your hw is very streamlined, but if you’re using something peculiar you are on your own.
If you really want the latest updates for gaming, but also benefit from the large adoption of a debian based distro you can also try PikaOS, which is Debian testing release optimized for gaming experience, think about it like a Cachy based on Debian rather than Arch
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pikaos
just keep in mind that in comparison to Mint it surely be less tested, and that anyway even with cachy vs mint in gaming tests the advantages of cachy are practically negligible, and the main difference in perf is given by gfx driver quality, in which specific case nvidia linux drivers are historically the black sheep of the story
Pika is friggen amazing. I started my Linux journey with Bazzite but kept having weird issues and switched to pika. Shit just works and doesn’t get in your way.
choose something with a good track record that won’t go away anytime soon
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.
I’ve heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down
No this is generally put out there by people that don’t understand the workflow of an atomic distro. Yes the file system directories are generally readonly. You can still layer packages, or use flatpaks and sysexts to add software or install things in a container. There is nothing much that can’t be achieved in an atomic/immutable distro, its just a different workflow. If you want something unbreakable an atomic distro is the way to go
It’s being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich
for those applications any distro that lets you use docker and docker compose. If you don’t know how to use them, do yourself a favor and learn. It makes self-hosting so much easier and makes the base OS almost irrelevant.
Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work?
Since you seem set on these two, go with Bazzite. Between Distrobox and Docker, Bazzite being an immutable OS seems like a non-issue. After you play around with it, if you feel like you want something that could potentially require more of your time but gives you a little more control, go with CachyOS but ensure you are using ZFS, btrfs, or some other file system that allows rollbacks.
I’ve distro-hopped a lot over the years. Ubuntu (most flavors), Fedora, Debian, Arch, Solus, EndeavourOS, CentOS, Alma, more I’m forgetting, and even some BSDs. Out of all of them, I keep going back to Ubuntu for my servers. I like the release cycles, it’s never given me any issues that I didn’t cause myself, the packages are new enough, the installer lets you set up ZFS and 3rd party tools/software (like Nvidia drivers), and there is a ton of documentation. I want my server to be an appliance, not something I tinker with, and Ubuntu does that really well. If I do feel like tinkering, I do it in a VM or container.
Docker has been the deployment method of choice, thus far, and the plan is to continue that method since I’m already familiar.
I’m not attached to either, I’ve seen a lot of people recommend them. Debian has gotten more than a few recommendations in this thread, so I’m checking out PikaOS now.
As much as I didn’t want to, it’s really seeming like I’m going to need to pick a few a test them out. Bazzite, CachyOS, and PikaOS are all on the list right now. Plan to install steam, install a game or two, and see how things go there. Followed up by a potentially small deployment of Jellyfin and a tiny library to see how easy it is to get hardware transcoding up and running.
You mentioned ZFS or other file systems… And that brings up another question I forgot to add to the OP… As of right now. The plan is to have the media files on the 3 disk pool. I was planning on using ZFS for that, but hadn’t landed on a FS for the OS drive and other storage drive.
Is it common practice to use one FS across all drives? Or would ZFS work well enough on its own for the pool and use a different FS for the OS/storage drives?
Docker has been the deployment method of choice…
Nice 😎
I’m not attached to either, I’ve seen a lot of people recommend them. Debian has gotten more than a few recommendations in this thread, so I’m checking out PikaOS now.
The biggest problem you are going to have is the NVIDIA graphics card. As long as you overcome the hurdle of installing those drivers, any of the popular desktop OSs should be fine. Some people seem to get them going no problem but for others, it’s a show stopper. The OSs that have the option for installing the drivers during installation are nice for that reason.
As much as I didn’t want to, it’s really seeming like I’m going to need to pick a few a test them out…
Yeah. Unfortunately that’s going to be the best way to learn what you want from your OS. It’s equally frustrating and rewarding.
Is it common practice to use one FS across all drives? Or would ZFS work well enough on its own for the pool and use a different FS for the OS/storage drives?
Depends on the environment, really; there’s no wrong answer. ZFS will work fine for its own pool. I would say a FS with snapshotting and rollback capabilities are almost a requirement for Arch based/rolling release distros. You never know when an update might break something.
I’ve been testing out ZFS on my OS drive for my personal server and it’s probably overkill because all the important stuff is on the ZFS pool with backups. My OS drive could shit the bed at any moment and I could switch it out with anything else because of that pool.
While you can put your root filesystem on ZFS and many people do it, it is considered a little more advanced setup and it’s more common to run ext4 on
/and then zfs for mounted datasets on e.g./varand/home.A catch with ZFS is that it does not have a compatible license with Linux, which prevents many distros from shipping compiled modules directly. So the most common way to ship it is by DKMS, which (automatically) compiles the ZFS module from source. This is done by installing the
zfs-dkmspackage.The ZFS version obviously needs to be compatible with your kernel and sometimes it can take a while for ZFS to Linux. Arch does not coordinate releases so especially if you’re not on the LTS kernel, you can run into situations where ZFS is no longer available after an upgrade. Furthermore,
zfs-dkmsis not in Arch repos but in AUR so you have to build even that from source for each upgrade of ZFS. Not recommended for beginners.That a partial or failed system upgrade can leave you in a place without ZFS modules is one reason why putting
/on ZFS is not more common.In debian, you just
apt-get install zfs-dkms.Alpine Linux maintainers decided to just ignore the license issue and ship a compiled
zfspackage including kernel modules.
Can highly recommend Bazzite. You can install most applications and terminal programs no problem through flatpak/brew and config any well behaved package through settings files in your home directory anyways. If you really need specific system level packages, then it’s quite straightforward tinkering to setup a GitHub repo that builds a daily image for you based on Bazzite. If you break something, you just roll back to a previous build.
And for testing out new “live” packages: you can! Just make sure you don’t forget to persist them into your custom image if it turns out to be a useful addition.
I think I added just a handful packages on top of Bluefin (the non-gaming version) and it runs rather merrily.
Immutable sounds locked down, but to me it’s more like highly reproducible tinkering. Just keep your home dir clean ✨
just download mint and distrohop from there until you feel settled. there’s too many options to make a final decision from the start. mint works out of the box and you get get a hang of it.
OR use cachyos but prepare to open the archwiki frequently
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.
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 is rock-solid stable, but lacks newer packages. It’s great for a server, not so great for […] general computing.
What the fuck??? I’ve been daily driving Debian for years now on my personal laptops, desktop, mini PC, and mutliple servers. I’ve found and reported Linux kernel vulnerabilities on my trusty Debian systems.
What do you mean it’s not so great for general computing? What can’t you do with Debian computing-wise that you can do with other distros? The only issues I’ve ever had was with some LaTeX packages being older versions. You just get that from CTAN and install that manually.
This is such a ridiculous comment. What do you do on a server that’s not general computing? You’re doing a subset of general computing??? How does a fucking distro actively prevent you from doing general computing???
Packages are frequently outdated. Older packages can be difficult for new users who want a computer to “just work”. It’s fine for general computing, but not great.
Also fuck off with this attitude man. I’m not attacking you, learn how to speak to people.
Also fuck off with this attitude man. I’m not attacking you, learn how to speak to people.
Sorry. I get quite triggered when people add pseudo-labels to distributions, mainly Debian being outdated. Looking back, I was quite harsh and I apologize.
However, you’re actively spreading the false narrative by saying Debian’s not good for “general computing” - this is what triggers me. A distribution is nothing but its package manager and some defaults. Some have different defaults and package managers.
Older packages can be difficult for new users who want a computer to “just work”.
The only place this makes a difference is with the latest hardware which OP does not have. I have more recent hardware than OP and Debian 13 + KDE Plasma 6 works out of the box.
It’s fine for general computing, but not great.
Again, I really hate this sentence. I will tone down the rudeness this time in explaining why. I have daily-driven Debian for years with AMD + Intel CPUs, Nvidia GPUs (1070, 3060) with use cases ranging wildly through the years. I cannot fathom what kind of general computing cannot work. If you say specialized computing, I would still disagree as there are always ways to make things work.
Just off the top of my head where things are iffy with Debian: bat cannot be installed via a package manager, but not on most distros anyway. There’s a deb package though which works. Similar with dust, although more distros have it in their package manager.
Debian, like you said, is rock-solid stable. In my many years of developing code, university courses, daily work (research), maintaining servers with wildly different usages, Debian’s “outdated” packages have only let me down once and that was with a LaTeX package which could be installed via ctan anyway.
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.
Oh interesting. I’ve been live booting PikaOS so far just to see how difficult it is to get certain things up and running and… I don’t know if it’s the OS or if it’s the fact that its live image, but getting certain things up and running so bar has been a pain. Docker didn’t install easily (CLI was a pain compared to double clicking the .deb downloaded from Dockers website), and I couldn’t get Jellyfin to HW transcode through docker, so I installed that through Pika’s software discovery thing. Xbone controller wouldn’t connect (but that could be a failed BT module on the mobo. I remember having issues with it on windows)… So yea… Off to a great start lol
If Bazzite is going to give even more problems then it sounds like I should stay away from it. The computer will mostly be doing server work, which it sounds like Debian might be the way to go?
The gaming aspect isn’t going to be the latest and greatest games. Most couch co-op type games. My main PC is still on win10 for that stuff.
Does booting from a live USB restrict me more so than just commiting to an install on the boot drive? Is Ventoy limiting me? That’s how I’ve been booting so far, but am about to flash to the USB to start the troubleshooting process
I don’t think Ventoy would be the limiter there. It sounds to me like its the live distro version. Those can be restricted to running a few apps and being used to install the full version. Often things like hotplug devices don’t work too well with live distros.
If the system is primarily going to be a server, I’d recommend Debian, but I’m definitely biased. It’s stable, well supported, and documented. I normally install it with the Cinnamon desktop (just in case) and ssh server, and nothing else, then add what I need manually as I go. As a lot of folks in the comments mentioned, the biggest issue with the “stable” distros is that they stay stable by long delaying integrating new modules and drivers. Fantastic for a server, not so great for gaming rigs that are going to need the latest software, fixes, and developments.
My issue with Bazzite, even on a rig that was going to be primarily for gaming was anything else I wanted to do that was not just gaming. You can’t install software from .rpm. I tried making some changes to .conf files via command line (using sudo and root) and was denied, so I just noped my way to Nobara. I’m still recommending Bazzite to a friend who also mostly games on his PC. He’s not nearly as techie, doesn’t have a complicated home network, and just needs something that will plug and play and let him game. And from my perspective as the person he’ll call if something doesn’t work, if it prevents him from breaking things, EVEN BETTER. xD
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.
I would definitely give Bazzite a try. If you are looking for stability and a set and forget OS. If you don’t like it you could always try something else.
If you are looking for something to tinker with and change things like manually changing packages or messing with services you probably want a more traditional “non-atomic” os
Don’t let talk of the filesystem being “read only” scare you. You can still save files to your desktop and documents and stuff in your user folder.
In windows terms it’s more like imagine
C:/windowsbeing read-only so you can’t break your system. You can still write files to other parts of the drive, but it prevents you from messing up your install (some people like this added layer or stability, some don’t like it because it makes tinkering with your system harder)An atomic OS is kinda like a phone OS, in the sense that every version of iOS 26 comes with the same version of Safari and the same libraries. It makes it so any bugs are reproducible and easier for the developers to track down. Packages are pinned to the OS version. (For example all installs of Bazzite 20260101 will include Nvidia drivers 590.44.01-1)
In a more traditional Linux distro because packages can be updated to whatever version if you install Ubuntu the version of Nvidia drivers is not tied to the OS version. You could have an install of Ubuntu 25.10 and could have a completely different Nvidia driver version from someone else on Ubuntu 25.10. This could make bugs harder to trace because you could have the same OS version but different packages. Think of this like even though you and a friend could both have (Windows 11 25H2 installed you could have different drivers installed)
As for updating Bazzite generally auto updates once a week in the background. It requires 0 manual intervention and keeps your packages and drivers up to date. You can turn this off if you wanted to. Since it uses a “image” based approach (again imagine upgrading from iOS 26 -> 26.1) it is able to save the previous version of the OS. So if the upgrade broke something you can roll your system back to a known good state with a single command.
If you are looking for something that’s set and forget I would definitely give it a try.
If you want to tinker with it and figure out how Linux works I would probably try arch or something
Why would anyone stick to one distro? Just jump in figure it out yourself. I had no help and I managed. Find a beater and beat it. I started on mint… now I run 4 distros. JUST DO IT! People will cringe but I like pop OS amoung many other. I just recently installed https://www.coreboot.org/ and linux on a old acer chrome desktop. The documentation was sparse and incomplete but by the grace of dog I got it working. It was a pain in the arse but pretty neato after I was done. I have it on a roling cart to test and set up routers or do things with networks when I need to connect externally to test stuff out. The struggle and the uncertainy is the point… from there it will snowball into you wanting to install linux on every thing. But whats up with this BSD thingie… like I said crack some eggs!!! The feds can crack anything but the point of it all is to take control! Have you tried a bootable USB or virtual machine? I find all distros relativly stable clearly, windows or mac OSX have never met my standards anyways. Always back up your files. Thats my inflated 2 cents. Get some… get off the pot before you forget how to walk!!! Everyones got opinions like they got arse holes. PS. if it is a tower just add more bootable drives. Who cares if it fails cause you got it backed up! When things break it is a oppertunity to learn and cry.
And for trying lots of distros and with a suitably sized USB stick, Ventoy will be useful. Great for storing a load of distros on a stick for live boots and testing versions.
However, there’s a caveat that not all distros support being booted by ventoy. IIRC Bazzite is one such distro and mentioned here a lot.
@andybytes @ridethisbike Have to say I really disagree with this. Life is too short. Pick one and stick with it, it will serve you well for many years to come.
I had horrible experience with Bazzite. Installer somehow corrupted a separate win10 installation on another drive, I couldn’t get Samba 1 to connect to a network share, ‘ujust updating’ caused boot to black screen, and in general the online support is abysmal compared to older more established distros like Ubuntu.
Wiped and installed (win10 again, and) Mint fixed all the issues. Samba 1 unlocking works so the network drive is accessible, updated everything with one click and it didn’t crash on reboot, both OS’s appear in the boot list, and it being much older the support is far easier to obtain as a newbie.
Literally just installed Mint (and reinstalled), a couple days ago so I’m as wet behind the ears as they come. IMO the people recommending Bazzite don’t care of their system breaks and it takes 2 hours to fix every 2nd week (I assume this will improve as you gain xp with the BS/Bazzite Software).
Bazzite is designed to not break, it’s part of what makes immutable so great. Your problems were likely external to the distro itself.
Not at all blaming you, bad experiences happen, especially when dual-booting, but by the very nature of being immutable it’s as solid and stable as possible.
Mint has been rock solid for me. Not one crash in a year. Its easy and has some of the best support
