Thanks for the heads up. I’m fine with X11 for general usage, but I’ve read that games tend to perform better under Wayland, so that’s probably going to be an important factor.

This is my first time hearing of Bottles. It looks like it serves a similar purpose to Lutris? Have you used both, and if so, how do they compare?

Thanks for sharing your experience! It sounds like Mint is mostly pretty manageable for a casual user, which is good news for me.

I think a lot of Linux programs have moved to a distribution format called “flatpak” which I am not super familiar with, but I believe behaves the way you prefer (just download the app file and run it). Though fwiw, the command-line script installers are generally not actually doing much different from installers on Windows or Mac - they’re just not hidden behind a progress bar.

The person in question loves their Steam Deck, but occasionally wants to play a game that requires a little more processing power. My first thought when I started researching was to check whether SteamOS was generally available for PCs (sadly, it’s not).

Have you used Bazzite for long?

I appreciate the concern, friend. They are absolutely getting a debloated Windows install if Linux doesn’t work out for any reason. And I’ll probably be avoiding Gentoo for this particular use case, which should hopefully minimise the issues with drivers and compatibility software. ;)

I’m definitely aiming to keep the hoop-jumping to the minimum. Ideally, I’m just going to set up their user account, log them into Google and Steam, pin some stuff to the taskbar and everything will “just work” from there.

if this means anything, I’d switch my 85-year-old father with dementia to Linux Mint without worrying that he wouldn’t know his way around.

This means a lot, as it’s actually not too far off from what I’m trying to do. Thanks!

Very good point about rolling release vs point release - I’ll definitely factor that into the final decision.

The primary reason I’m considering gaming distros is to have everything be as out-of-the-box as possible. I was thinking that issues with Steam/Proton will be less likely on a distro purpose-built to support them. But based on several of the comments here, it sounds like that might not be the case.

It’s going to be pure Steam and maybe a Minecraft install, so no concerns there. Keeping it simple is my goal.

Thanks for your insights!

Yeah, I am half expecting this not to work out, and I am fully prepared to install and debloat Windows for them if I have to. But I love Linux, so I want to give it a shot at least.

I’m disappointed to hear that Mint doesn’t have Plasma 6 yet - I use Plasma 5 daily, so I’m familiar with its issues.

I’m unfamiliar with btrfs, but I feel like I remember it being a bit controversial at some point. AFAIK ext4 is still standard. Seems like btrfs has gained some popularity though, so I’ll have to give that a look.

Fedora is probably my next choice after Ubuntu in terms of mainstream non-gaming distros, so I’m happy to see a vote for it.

Thanks for your insight!

I definitely checked up on SteamOS general availability first since my Deck experience has been great haha

I haven’t heard of ChimeraOS before. This looks like a solid contender as far as Arch-based distros go. I don’t know if booting into Steam Big Picture is desirable, but I see it ships with Gnome so I assume you can choose to boot to desktop. I’ll look into this one too. Thanks for the recommendation!

I must shamefully admit I’ve been ignoring Mint since I first heard about it years back, under the assumption that it was just another transient Ubuntu derivative. But as a Debian guy, this looks like it might actually be perfect. I think I’ll actually slap Mint on an old Thinkpad and try it out as a daily driver.

This is the first I’ve heard of Zorin. I’ll definitely be giving this a hard look. Thanks for the recommendation!

Ubuntu would probably be my first pick if I hadn’t been seeing so much praise for all these “gaming” distros recently - it’s definitely a contender if I run into any showstoppers.

Bold of you to assume I own a house

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I’m not sure all of those generalisations hold up, but I think it’s safe to say that some people immigrate to a country because they want to live there, and some immigrate because they want the benefits associated with living there.

Who would win:

• A 2 trillion dollar multinational technology company
• Some guy’s hobby project