Knoppix is a fun one :) Didn’t know it was independent.

Can you name 10 base/independent distros?

Mostly, I’ve only had minor issues: Old packages on Linux Mint, missing packages on Debian and Arch, system instability after updating without a reboot on many distros (NixOS, Fedora, Alma, …). But I’ve had two major issues that caused me to abandon a distro:

1. On Fedora KDE, I felt that my system was overall not as stable as other distros. Then they decided to ship (as a rolling update to a “stable” version) an experimental KDE patch that broke the lock screen for a week. The breakage itself was not so bad, but shipping a patch before upstream merged it to their nightly builds irked me quite a bit.

2. On NixOS, I was not able to get development stuff to work (I’m probably just too dumb for Nix/NixOS). First, I tried to set up a dev workflow that has quite a few external constraints (glibc version, Python version, running on other distros, …). I failed on multiple fronts and gave up on this. Then I tried to build my own KDE/Kirigami app on NixOS and also struggled a lot with it. I struggled for quite a while but gave up on it in the end. I moved to CachyOS afterwards and it worked flawlessly 🤷

Interesting. To me, they both offer a desktop experience (panel, start menu, tray icons, windows, tiling, virtual desktops, …) that captures all the things I liked about the windows interface. What sets them apart for you? I get the wish for Mint KDE though, would be nice :)

If you’re looking for Mint with KDE Plasma, Kubuntu should be a fine choice. I would also not overthink it too much, it’s quite easy to tune things (e.g. remove snaps on Ubuntu) or switch distro afterwards. Mint, Kubuntu, and Fedora all allow you to play around and find out what you like (and dislike).

In my experience it works with some games but doesn’t with others. And if it breaks, the game just stops without any error message/information (you can get some info on the terminal). I would avoid it if at all possible. NTFS support is also overall still rather poor (e.g. my Mint install recently stopped working with NTFS drive until I ran chkdsk on Windows).

I think most distros would work for that usecase. I would recommend Linux Mint, Fedora (although Nvidia drivers are more annoying there), or (K)Ubuntu. Have a look at desktop environments too, as they are very important for your experience. Some of the major ones are Cinnamon, KDE Plasma, and Gnome. Mint works best with Cinnamon, Fedora and Ubuntu let you choose which ISO you want to download.

If we’re talking about the RTX 900/1000 series, they’re still supported on the 580 driver branch. They’re just not getting new features anymore. Most distros package these legacy drivers too.

It really should be shut down for Arch’s sake.

I think it should really be split into two parts:

1. The more widely used packages should be moved to an official repository with review procedures. Perhaps the (quality) requirements can be lower, but these must be reviewed by trusted people.
2. The remaining packages should be moved to user namespaces, like the other user-package repos do. That will at least prevent (most) takeover attacks.

the CPU is never taxed, albeit undervolted with minus 30 on all cores in PBO

In case of an unstable system, the first thing I would do is disable all overclocks (including PBO, EXPO, undervolt, …)

Do you think benchmark results like these are meaningful when comparing Linux distributions?

They don’t really provide any explanation for why it should be faster than CachyOS. So I’d take their claims with a bucket or two of salt.

Due to the VLC updates taking up too many lines in our terminal, we have decided to drop VLC from the extra repository. Users who wish to play back videos can install them from the AUR.

jk

It’s a type of question that Arch/Cachy often ask during regular updates. Here it’s about replacing a package. Sometimes you also need to make a choice between multiple packages or even perform some manual actions (see https://archlinux.org/). This requires you to possibly look it up, understand the change, and make a decision. If you screw it up, you can break your system.

My point was not that this is bad. Arch Linux is intentionally and explicitly targeted at proficient users. This is part of the deal. It can even be nice, because it gives you more insight into and control over what goes on under the hood in your system. However, I don’t think this is a good experience for (most) new users.

I would not recommend CachyOS to any beginners because after installation it still behaves like regular Arch. Just from today’s update:

Replace vlc-plugin-kwallet with cachyos-extra-v3/vlc-plugin-libsecret? [Y/n]

That said, I don’t agree with your claims. CachyOS puts a lot of effort into optimizing performance (at the cost of other things, e.g. disk space, server load, support for older hardware, …), especially for gaming workloads. There have been many benchmarks that consistently show it performing better than other distros out-of-the-box. Generally, the advantage seems to be in the 0 to 15% range. Does that matter? That probably depends on who’s asking.

You are correct that all the optimizations are open for everybody to see and copy. However, the mainstream distros don’t seem to be interested in doing that for now. And applying the CachyOS optimizations (different kernel, scheduler, optimized packages for Zen 4, …) to other distros (say Ubuntu) is not really feasible or advisable for most users.

PS: I had to look it up, and of course people tried xD.

Yeah, I actually switched distro to get Wayland multi-monitor VRR. But, unfortunately, it seems that it’s kinda broken with my Novideo GPU :(

Seems LLM Generated as well. Because I don’t think Fortnite works well (if at all) on Linux. This just seems an LLM reassuring the Dev that it works? IDK.

Yeah, it’s for sure AI slop.

Please don’t run scripts that a random person uploaded to Github if you don’t know what you’re doing. I didn’t see anything malicious here, but most of the stuff is useless and some of it is even detrimental (e.g. the LLM “thought” the outdated Ubuntu Nvidia ppa was a good idea).

If you want to game on Debian, you can do that just fine. Installing Steam and Nvidia drivers (if applicable) should be sufficient for most people. IMO, the main issue with gaming on Debian are the very old GPU drivers (Nvidia 550, Mesa 25.0). This can be fine on older hardware, but is the reason why I wouldn’t recommend Debian for gaming in general. The script you linked doesn’t help with this at all.

If you really want these “gaming optimizations”, for the limited benefits they provide, I would recommend that you just use one of the distros that ships them. CachyOS, Bazzite, Nobara, Pop OS, or PikaOS all seem like a better choice than these scripts. At the very least the maintainers of those distros will integrate everything and perform some level of QA for you.