Bazzite. Its pretty swell for gaming, comes with an install script at launch for whatever you want extra, and you update manually or automatically so its pretty low maintenance.

Installed without a hitch, and I game on nvdia. Should work even better for you. Get the right iso though, the desktop non nvdia one.

Bazzite Bazzite Bazzite!

I was at the same point a while ago.

Everything I touch breaks, and I also had enough of my system breaking because updating with an unstable power grid is like playing russian roulette.

I turned to Fedora Silverblue first, then rebased to uBlue. Aurora first, and then Bazzite. Silverblue feels exactly as the regular variant, Aurora is great for desktop use, and for my gaming PC, Bazzite is fucking great. It just works.

It comes with a lot of tweaks and super many small additions that just make your life easier, especially for gaming.

Updates just happen in the background when there's nothing better to do and get applied to the next boot image. And in case something doesn't work as expected, you can always go back in time.

You can also customise it almost/ just as much as regular distros, but it isn't quite as easy if you want to customise A LOT (e.g. using TWMs).

I didn't notice huge performance boosts tho, it just comes with more tools ootb, for example to make your GPU more silent when idle.

As said, Bazzite is based on Fedora, so you always get new great modern stuff, at the same time as the other Fedora users do.

Bro, I distro hopped between 10 different distros. Bazzite is the best, hands down. If you game and do non-dev work on it, it's the best thing ever. It just gets out of the way. It's very hard to brick your install. It freaking rocks.

I've been on Bazzite for half a year, and I'm moving my secondary PC to Bazzite tomorrow.

Bazzite if you want no bullshit easy mode and bulletproof.

Cachyos if you wanna tinker and squeeze out that last 10% in performance.

I tried out Bazzite on my Legion Go and was so impressed I immediately stopped distro hopping and installed it on my daily as well. Hardware wise everything works out of the box. It's based on Fedora Kinoite so it's quite well documented if you run into trouble or want to start doing weird shit. The few times I've had issues (mostly with flatpak sandboxing) they've been solvable with a quick web search.

linux typically won't hard freeze on errors like that no matter the distro. it can, but rarely. being an all amd build i suspect there's some cpu bios feature auto scaling core clock or voltage and in my experience ryzen cpus need to have a manually set stable clock and voltage to perform properly no matter the os. try checking your bios and disabling any powersaving or auto-scaling features for your cpu and manually set it for stock clock and voltage. you may need to look up what these values are as the bios might not have a default value for you. this might not be your issue but it's worth trying. good luck!

Not immutable, but I slapped Garuda on a 2016 gaming laptop to give it a second life and it’s been great for the most part. I got a bit fiddly with it and had to fight my way through some partial upgrade issues, but know I arch based distros better and it’s stable as can be. I honestly don’t update it that often since it just serves are my TV box, and I’m seriously considering swapping to a Nix install now that I’ve mostly stabilized my package list for the purposes of gaming and video encoding. Proton is one of the only things I think get regular updates on that device, but those are entirely handled by Steam, so immutable is very attractive to me for a gaming only system.

I’ll also add that my primary device has arch on it and I do most of my gaming (but also work) there. It’s great, and I can’t help but feel a lot of the distros that are “made for gaming” suffer from a lot of the issues that windows does. They are trying to be preconfigured to work with any and all hardware. This leads to bloated package lists, and just extra guffins to work around as you trouble shoot. I’d say my arch install took a bit longer to get gaming super stable, but I’ve also had to fix much fewer issues compared to the Garuda install.

All the people mentioning Bazzite are making me eye it to replace Garuda tho.

I installed Bazzite about a week ago. Other then the Nvidia performance not being quite as fast and me not having figured out what I am going to use for design for 3D printing yet, my biggest problem has been that I can't seem to get the setting for a custom login screen image to stick.

So all in all it's been pretty painless.

in my experience seeing a few new people come through our support channels the immutables unfortunately had a bigger learning curve