I’d definitely like to get some of the classic multiplayer games running on emulators as well.

Bazzite does allow easy install of EmuDeck and RetroDECK during first installation, which should cover most of your emulation needs. For completeness' sake; Batocera does exist. However, I'm not sure if it runs e.g. Steam games as good as Bazzite runs retro games.

I don't know by heart if it's able to do your bidding, but perhaps it's worth checking out penguins-eggs. I guess the following would be its elevator pitch:

"penguins-eggs is a console tool, under continuous development, that allows you to remaster your system and redistribute it as live images on usb sticks or via PXE.

The default behavior is total removal of the system's data and users, but it is also possible to remaster the system including the data and accounts of present users, using flag --clone. It is also possible to keep the users and files present under an encrypted LUKS file within the same resulting iso file, flag --cryptedclone.

You can easily install the resulting live system with the calamares installer or the internal TUI krill installer."

The link for uBlue didn't work for me. For those interested: uBlue

I mostly want to discourage distro hopping with the belief that they’re missing out on a program or desktop, only to end up on windows because they’re tired of reinstalling everything.

Thank you for being thoughtful! I just wanted to add some nuance with my previous comment.

Software support seems lacking.

Compared to the AUR, the offering of any other distro will feel lacking (besides this one). Consider an Arch-distrobox for access to the AUR or install the Nix package manager on Fedora through Determinate Systems' installer.

Xorg wiki page.

Fedora's Wiki leaves a lot to desire in general, especially if you've come from the ArchWiki. On that note, I would argue only ArchWiki and Gentoo's Wiki are excellent showcases of how the Wiki of a distro should look like.

Furthermore, Fedora has been the first to enable Wayland by default (since 2016 in fact). Therefore, I don't find it that surprising that Fedora didn't think it's worth putting man-hours to the documentation of a project for which its sunset was in sight.

How so? I literally don't see it. My apologies if I come across as obnoxious, but I simply don't understand how I might have contradicted myself. I never explicitly mentioned Debian anyways, so why did you feel the need to mention that as somehow being related to a supposed contradiction.

Regarding 4; I suppose you're looking for the ArcMenu extension if you wish to continue using GNOME as your Desktop Environment (will be abbreviated to DE from here on). Though GNOME's workflow is considerably different to Windows'. Therefore, you might be interested into looking elsewhere unless you're actually interested to continue GNOME. FWIW, GNOME is one of the most popular and most polished DEs out there, but it's very opinionated; which rub some folk the wrong way. I personally like it, but others might differ on this. Lastly, GNOME is NOT particularly known to be light. Therefore, if you're not happy with how it runs; e.g. frame skips with animations or just high RAM usage overall, then perhaps consider Xfce or Lxqt. If you're not discontent about the performance on GNOME, then you could also consider KDE or Cinnamon as those might 'feel' more 'modern' than the aforementioned Xfce and Lxqt.

Regarding 5; Ubuntu gets a lot of hate due to:

• how they're forcing Snaps (their in-house universal package manager; therefore a direct competitor to Flatpak) onto its users. So much so that even attempting to install some packages through apt will result in the Snap being installed instead; which is basically unprecedented within the Linux landscape.
• some mishaps in the past resulted in very bad PR; especially to those that are privacy-conscious and/or F(L)OSS-advocates.

You'd have to get to your own conclusions though. It's probably still the most used distro and therefore you might expect some QoL-features are only found within. If you're inconclusive, just try it out and consider reporting back to us on how it went. Regarding old hardware; the DE is the most important factor anyways.

You may be happy, or perhaps dismayed, to learn that I finally installed Bazzite on my desktop.

Well played! Welcome to the cool kids club! I've actually used Bazzite myself for a short while a couple of months ago. It felt like a holiday destination with lots of cool stuff, but it was more opinionated than what I'm comfortable with. So I returned back home (read: custom uBlue image) afterwards, where I am in command for what's found inside and where I am free to do whatever I will. Though, I did pick up some of the things I liked from Bazzite 😜, so it was not for naught 😉.

I did a bit tonne of sampling, with BlendOS and Vanilla, trying things out, but Fedora wins.

Very interesting! I've got my own reasons for preferring Fedora *cough* ~security~ *cough*, but I'm very interested to know your findings! I'd have to admit that Vanilla OS' upcoming 2.0 Orchid update is very tempting though.

I have Fedora Silverblue on a usb in case Bazzite does not like my computer,

Hmm..., perhaps consider the following:

1. Rebase back to Silverblue with rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/39/x86_64/silverblue (assuming you're already on Fedora 39).
2. After you've booted into Silverblue, pin the Silverblue-deployment with sudo ostree admin pin 0.
3. While still in the Silverblue-deployment, rollback to Bazzite with rpm-ostree rollback.
4. Reboot, and you should notice that you have one additional entry in the GRUB-menu. That's the Silverblue-deployment where you can always fall back on; just in case*.

The above steps do assume that you haven't pinned any prior Silverblue-deployments; as you don't necessarily need multiple Silverblue-deployments 😅. Furthermore, they assume no additional steps involving Nvidia; but that's mostly because I don't have any experience dealing with that (thankfully).

I swear I will just jump onto the NIXOS (or guix) bandwagon if I ever decide to switch again.

FWIW, you can install both Nix and Guix on Silverblue.

It's often used to describe a distro in which (at least some) parts of the system are read-only on runtime. Furthermore, features like atomicity (i.e. an upgrade either happens or doesn't; no in-between state), reproducibility^[1]^ and improved security against certain types of attacks are its associated benefits that can (mostly) only exist due to said 'immutability'. This allows higher degree of stability and (finally) rollback-functionality, which are functionalities that are often associated with 'immutability' but aren't inherently/necessarily tied to it; as other means to gain these do exist.

The reason why I've been careful with the term "immutable" (which literally is a fancy word for "unchanging"), is because the term doesn't quite apply to what the distros offer (most of these aren't actually unchanging in absolute sense) and because people tend to import associations that come from other ecosystems that have their own rules regarding immutability (like Android, SteamOS etc). A more fitting term would be atomic (which has been used to some degree by distros in the past). The name actually applies to all distros that are currently referred to as 'immutable', it's descriptive and is the actual differentiator between these and the so-called 'mutable' distros. Further differentiation can be had with descriptions like declarative, image-based, reproducible etc.

1. That is, two machines that have the exact same software installed should be identical even if one has been installed a few years ago, while the other has been freshly installed (besides content of home folder etc). So stuff like cruft, bitrot and (to a lesser degree) state are absent on so-called 'immutable' distros.

we use discord

Fortunately, Discord has (very recently) started to officially support Linux as a flatpak.

Thanks for the correction!

There are like a gazillion questions one might ask to better derive what keyboard would suit you best. As so far you haven't given us much to work with, I'll just post my personal favorites:

• Dygma Raise
• Ultimate Hacking Keyboard

Obviously, I'm a sucker for splittable keyboards that adhere to traditional layouts. With both of these being the current endgame-models within that space; tilt, wrist support, excellent software, good add-ons, name it and it's probably found between the two.