I use Arch with KDE. I don't recommend Manjaro because it has historically had some serious problems, so for people who want Arch without as much hassle, I'm recommending EndeavourOS. It's what Manjaro should be like.
Operating Systems
All things operating system related, from Windows to Mac to Linux distros and the more obscure.
Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Debian
All of my workstations are now running Fedora Silverblue. Steam is installed via flatpak, and GPU is a Radeon 6800 XT. I also have a Steam Link for couch co-op. All is well on the gaming front!
Debian Sid and Arch have run equally well with this setup. Your choice of distro matters much less now compared to a few years ago, especially if you favour a flatpak workflow.
Edit: typos!
Pop!_OS. It just works, it's easy, and it makes me enjoy using my computer.
I'm starting to want to try Pop.. they seem to have quite a few fans around here!
It is one of the simplest ones to play games on
garuda, it's just a fancy arch install with the ugliest, bloatiest, default theming you can imagine, but once you get rid of it it's pretty solid.
I would take a look at pop_os. It's Ubuntu, but without Snap and a closer to mainline kernel version. They have a lot of great usability tweaks too.
I run Arch BTW. I just like to make things difficult :)
I'm running Gentoo on my gaming PC, and would not want anything else.
It's very customizable, as it allows to tweak packages' optional dependencies at compile time. It's also rolling release, so no stress with distribution upgrades. Despite that, it's also very stable (most of the time...).
So far the only downside I've seen is that updates can take a while, as almost all packages get compiled from source.
Im running good old Ubuntu with gnome. I mostly play terraria, minecraft I and Bethesda rpgs these days so it does everything I need.
SourceMage! It's a source based distro like Gentoo. I've been using it as my main distro for a solid 10 months now, I'm very happy with it! We have flatpak so steam works great, as well as lutris and everything else. Definitely wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for simplicity though!
Definitely wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for simplicity though!
Or short install times. Compiling KDE takes forever. Or at least it did back when I used SourceMage, years and years ago.
Honestly, the times aren't too bad as long as you have a recent CPU! It definitely varies though - on my main PC, compiling glibc takes about 15 minutes, on my netbook that I had a smgl install on, it took about 20 hours lol
I've been on Manjaro for 3 years, honestly love it, it's treated me great for gaming and given me so little to have to fix that my wife has also been running it for 2 years.
Endeavour OS (PC and Laptop) and Steam OS. Very happy with both.
I use Void Linux. I like how much more up to date the libraries and apllications tend to be, it's quite similar to Arch in that regard, as it's a true rolling release just like Arch.
It also tends to be very stable as well, with couple minor issues I had ever experienced got fixes within 48-ish hours. One was hugin not launching, and the other a transition issue between pipewire-media-session and wireplumber being the default.
Void uses runit for service management, and is still multithreaded despite taking a more similar approach to just plain shell scripts, and constantly monitors services. What I like about this is more much simpler services are to write compared to SystemD, and then you just put a simlink to them from /etc/sv/ to /etc/runit/runsvdir/default/ to enable or disable.
Void also uses their own XBPS package system, which operates similar to pacman, and is equally fast. Void is basically a rolling release like Arch, with the latest updates, but instead has a more "classic" system management style, which I for one greatly appreciate.
After nearly a decade of distro hopping, Void is where I landed for at least the past several years, and I see no reason to leave. Just sharing incase someone else out there thinks this sounds like the system for them, and if so, Take a Step Into the Void, it might be what you're looking for. That's what I like about there being so many distros, there's choice to match each one's needs.
EndeavourOS with Plasma. migrated from Manjaro after one too many questionable decision on their side.
PopOS is best for out the box gaming, its similar to Ubuntu so you'll be familiar with it