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Sorry, but which of these distros is right for me? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by ClockworkN@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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I'm currently trying to decide between CatchyOS and Nobara.

I'm sorry to be generating another of this kind of conversation as I can see they are getting pretty tedious. But you see I'm finally getting ready to take the plunge and try Linux again (after a brief encounter in the early 2000s).

I'm a gamer and I care a lot about gaming but I'm also a game dev. I need to be able to use Unreal Engine, Blender, Gaea, and other dev tools. My understanding is that something like Bazzite isn't right for me there.

So I've been looking at CatchyOS and Nobara. I've read their documentation and so far leaning toward CatchyOS. But sometimes people say Nobara is easier to use. I am not afraid of a command line, but frankly I don't tinker with my computer for fun. I get in and get what I need set up so I can get back to making things.

So what do you all think?

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[-] dilroopgill@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago

Its a lot funner and faster to just test them all, grab ventoy throw all the isos on a ventoy usb, spend an hour installing and testing each, see if you like cachyos gaming packages and the wiki, or if you prefer another distro, I would go with a gaming distro the first time around so you figure out what packages you need and may want to keep in the future

[-] dilroopgill@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I use cachyos, its nice, has everything for gaming in a post insrall script you click a button, just install it and you wont want to distrohop, it has a good wiki, many yt videos, benefit is the aur, if you dont care about the aur go bazzite (only reason I don't use bazzite is aur, otherwise all Id use are flatpaks)

[-] dilroopgill@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Use limine and btrfs partition, activate snapper support early, so you can rollback easily if any issues arise, ive found it easiest with that bootloader.

[-] malwieder@feddit.org 3 points 5 months ago

I'd honestly stick to proven, well-supported distros like openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora or Ubuntu, especially as a newcomer.

[-] ISOmorph@feddit.org 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

This. I'm on Nobara on my main rig because I didn't know any better when I ditched Windows. It's a decent distro mind you. But it's really just Fedora with some experimental stuff from one dude (which breaks stuff from time to time). I've since installed tumbleweed on my laptop and am much happier with it. Next time something major breaks on the main rig I'm switching that too

[-] jimmy90@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

bazzite (based on fedora atomic) is working really well for me

i turned off all the gnome extensions they install by default but apart from that it's been great for gaming and dev work

[-] who@feddit.org 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

What's easy to use is pretty subjective. As a game developer, you're already at least a step or two removed from the proverbial average computer user. I suggest downloading live images of a few different distros and desktop environments, and playing with each for a while to get a feel for the differences.

I'm a gamer and developer, too. KDE Plasma is my desktop of choice these days.

I need to be able to use Unreal Engine

Someone else asked about this just 8 days ago, here:

https://beehaw.org/post/21209323

Regarding that particular requirement:

The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.

It's possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it's nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).

If you don't mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine

[-] dataprolet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago

It doesn't matter.

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Just to really clarify: there is no real performance difference between "gaming" distros and any other one. They just have some stuff pre-installed you can just install yourself. The only real thing you want to be aware of are standard distros vs immutable distros. I would steer clear of immutable until you're more comfortable in general.

All that being said CachyOS (Arch based) is fine, but skip Nobara and just go stock Fedora Gnome or KDE to skip the prepackaged customizations and just get a clean experience.

[-] Nachtara@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

What's the problem with nobara?

[-] vikingtons@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

The primary concern I see expressed about Nobara is that it's maintained by a single person. I'm not sure if that's still true today, however.

[-] ClockworkN@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Okay. I'd been hearing that performance gains were essentially immaterial or on a case by case basis, but that the prepacked stuff helps things "just work". For example I like Sim Racing and I use a Fanatec race wheel, I'm hoping that one of these would reduce the hassel with it.

[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Fanatec will need an extra kernel module: https://github.com/gotzl/hid-fanatecff

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world -1 points 5 months ago

They won't help anything materially work "better" let's say. I guess Nobara might have an edge with something like Nvidia drivers being prepackaged in a way that makes them easier to run on first install (it's a big maybe), but the same issues will arise after the fact with Nvidia's drivers, just because the hoops you have to jump through are the same everywhere. That's an Nvidia problem.

[-] jinx@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 months ago

those prepackaged nvidia drivers were a lifesaver for me personally. i kept hitting walls trying to get them on fedora.

[-] cymor@midwest.social 1 points 5 months ago

Try it, and if you don't like it try another. They're free.

[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Drive it like you stole it. If the wheels fall off get another one.

[-] Eczpurt@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

If you were only gaming I'd recommend CachyOS. I made the switch about a year ago with no hassles or tinkering. I will say though when updating it is important to pay attention to any warnings and keep a backup with something like timeshift to rollback to in emergencies!

Since you have development as another use case I'd be more inclined to use a fresh install of something like fedora and customise it yourself. I'd imagine it's less likely to break a new install rather than a customised fork if you try to change something.

[-] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 months ago

I tried a few and so far I am finding CachyOS to be the most painless.

[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

I don't have any interest in things like Blender or Unreal Engine but I'm curious what makes them incompatible with Bazzite? The only thing that's been a real PITA for me is old printer drivers (like a 15yo printers).

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

Any immutable distro is problematic for development and media workflows for a number of reasons. It's best to just go with the stock working versions of things unless there is a specific use-cases for using immutable.

[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

I develop (nothing graphical) and mostly Bazzite has been fine for development. Every now and then it's a little awkward (e.g. switching back and forth between a native terminal and distrobox) but I've never felt it was "incapable" of something. I just wouldn't discount immutables entirely. If OP is starting from scratch I think they could give it a spin and know within a week if it was incompatible with their workflows.

[-] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Fedora.

Possibly Open Suse

As a first distro why make it more complicated?

BTW: Never Ubuntu.

CachyOS, at the end of the day feels and acts like a bleeding edge linux distro. Fedora on the other hand hides all of that and yet is also bleeding edge. I usually get packages BEFORE CachyOS with Fedora (matter of days usually, but just highlighting how current it usually is).

[-] VivianRixia@piefed.social 0 points 5 months ago

The one thing I don't like about Fedora is how close it is to the Red Hat corporation. I know modern RHEL is downstream from Fedora so they can't suddenly end it, like they did with CentOS, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth.

[-] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago

Fedora is sponsored by Redhat it is true. Not the only sponsers of course. And I get that Redhat is IBM (sadly). I would be a lot more concerned if Redhat was under Oracle, so while IBM isn't great, it could be worse.

But other than that, it is a community driven model, I don't believe they take direction from Redhat or exclusively obfuscate or hamper OSS because of Redhat.

I mean if you go down this rabbit hole, take a look at all the major contributors and sponsors for the linux kernel itself....

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

🙄 this again.

[-] VivianRixia@piefed.social 0 points 5 months ago

I dont hang around here often, so I dont know the discourse. How is my prejudice against Fedora wrong? I've never used it because of this.

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

If you've never used it, don't seem to understand how the FOSS ecosystem works and the interaction between the things you speak about, why are you even commenting? Your opinion is literally based on nothing.

[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

What is your current OS?

I am also trialing cachyOS as a win10 replacement and I am liking it.

If your current OS supports virtualisation (as in not a home version of windows) run them in a VM and see how the os goes with normal tasks you do.

[-] jimerson@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

I recently gave CachyOS a shot and only ran into one issue, and resolved it by updating pacman. I've been using CachyOS ever since. YMMV.

[-] ClockworkN@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

I did decide to try CachyOS and I'm a week into it now. There's been some hurdles to get over though.

[-] jimerson@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

What sort of things have you ran in to? Were they mostly issues related to hardware?

[-] ClockworkN@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

I guess you could say that. The first is that I have multiple drives. I did install CachyOS on its own Ext4 drive but I have others that I wanted to use as is where I have games installed. They use NTFS. They worked on the first day fine but wouldn't auto mount on reboots. After setting them to auto mount and despite never booting back into windows they just stopped being writeable on subsequent use. Everything I researched said this had something to do with Windows fast boot. So I disabled that but the problem persisted until I installed ?ntfs-3g? And used it to run some kind of fix that set them as writeable.

Then eventually I found that any download that took some time in Steam would fail with disk read or write errors even when trying to install to my Ext4 root drive. I tried all sorts of download and cache clearing and uninstalling and reinstalling steam. Eentually someone said to run cachyos-bugreport.sh which revealed a whole bunch of usb device errors with a sim rig shifter. I unplugged it and since then my steam downloads are able to finish and work. I don't know how that is related but... Well anyway things are working right now.

[-] DaddleDew@lemmy.world -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I've started with Mint, switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed soon after because I wanted KDE. Swtiched to Fedora now.

IMO, if you can use Mint, you can use Fedora or OpenSUSE. They're just as easy.

OpenSUSE comes with easy BTRFs snapshots and home folder encryption setup in the installer. But it is a slightly oddball distro and a few things sometimes work a little different which sometimes requires workarounds. It comes with decent gui tools as well for maintining your packages and repository (yast)

Fedora is more mainstream, but doesn't have the abovementioned features easily accessible in the install or out of the box. You can have nice gui for managing your packages and repositories but it has to be installed by you. I still made the btrfs and encryption happen by following a tutorial on youtube. I'm happy with it.

IMO btrfs snapshots are essential to making the distro beginner friendly. It significantly simplifies fixing something that broke.

this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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