recently i just finished building a new pc. mostly for gaming since my only exposure to linux is steam os and i heard its uses arch with kde plasma so i try to emulate it as close as i can. however soon i realized how different it is and it requires more setup than i initially thought. i spent a whole day or two setting it up and i read now im responsible on maintaining it, what does it mean? is it just finding and testing drivers? or system update? what is the easiest way to do it? and what i getting myself into?
when i was about to install steam i found a tutorial on it with 3 - 4 pages full of text and was a bit overwhelmed, i decided just set it up using discover with flatpak, the problem is when i was about to find out how to do that i read mostly people really hate when you ask how to enable it in arch, is it really bad? should i just use konsole instead?
im not very tech savvy and at first I was really reluctant to use konsole but since i decided to use arch its inevitable that i have to use konsole and so far its not that bad, yet.
I’m just wondering for the long term, should i just change distro? or i should just powertrough arch and see where it goes.
thank you for your time.
edit:
thank you for all the kind words, support and information everyone. i decided that i’ll stick with arch until it breaks and ill see either i retry arch or try different linux flavors. i never feels so excited about os since i was messing around in win 2000
For gaming focused PC I’d look at Bazzite. OP wants it to be like the Steam Deck, it’s just perfect for that.
I almost always advise against atomic distros for noobs. They are extremely limiting, add multiple complications to otherwise simple tasks, and the padded cell of immutability means you can’t really fuck around and learn how traditional Linux systems work.
I’m usually distro agnostic and just happy to see people use whatever Linux they like, but immutables have issues.
Agreed.
CachyOS has all of the gaming stuff (can be just point and click with their welcome popup/installer), is arch based so there’s a ton of well made documentation.
Download yay and off to the races
I’ve been wanting to try Cachy, but my experience with Endeavour has been so good for so long that I’m not even feeling distro-hoppy. I admire Cachy from afar.
I used bazzite and I ran into the exact issues you described above. It worked, and it worked well, but anything extra that I wanted to do required jumping through a shit load of hoops and bouncing around between bazzite forums, fedora forums, and universal blue forums to maybe not even arrive at a reliable work around.
It was extremely valuable because I had to learn a lot, but it just wasn’t nearly as seamless as cachy.
Bazzite will play steam games right off the rip and it will do it well, and is an easy install. Beyond that it can get harry if you’re not just using flatpacks.
A lot of people will say “just use distrobox” if your solution to make something work in this OS is to download and use another OS, why wouldn’t I just start there with the other OS?
Yeah, this is exactly the point I was trying to make. I want a system that is simple and straightforward, running primarily native packages and a small handful of flatpaks. I don’t want or need to emulate other distros because my own distro has its wings clipped.
This is what I ran into when I first decided to try a linux system desktop after ten years. I wasn’t familiar with the new distros around these days, so decided to try Bazzite first. Immediately ran into a driver issue that was apparently not fixable until the (already released) fix made its way into their official repo or something.
Shelved that and gave CachyOS a try (made more sense anyway since I used arch in college and had a steam deck since day 1), and it’s been my daily driver for 6 months now.
You can do gaining in literally any distro. My pop install runs steam just fine.