Bazzite is currently seeing a hype wave, because it’s strongly inspired by what the Steam Deck does. But that also means, it’s somewhat built like an OS for a console (or in fact like Android), in that it’s a transactional/atomic distribution.
This means, you can’t easily make changes to the OS itself, only to the applications you install and of course your personal files.
It certainly makes it more difficult to break, but it’s still a relatively new thing in the Linux world and particularly you might still run into some limitations when trying to use it as a full-fledged desktop (depending on what you’re looking to do with your PC).
Garuda Linux is based on Arch Linux, which is what we refer to as “bleeding edge” (as opposed to “cutting edge”), because you get the newest version of all the software on your PC just a few days after it got released by the respective developers. Sometimes, those newest versions will have bugs.
You’ll find folks who’ll tell you they’ve been running Arch since they were two years old and never had a problem, but ultimately, why risk it?
And yeah, Trisquel is also getting basically a hard no from me. It’s a distribution for purists. For people who want nothing to do with the corporate world, who’d rather not be able to do something than rely on proprietary software.
If you’re coming from Windows, the chances of you even really knowing what that means are basically non-existent, so I doubt it’s what you want…
on desktop, i’m coming with windows, but i do have good relations with the linux kernel, as i am an android custom rom user for 2 years now, i’ve been on PerryRice kernel, now on Helios. And there are 114 user apps on my phone, and 32 are closed source, so that means 72% of my android is open-source. And my phone is also rooted and has a custom recovery installed. I use my phone for everything, Windows only for gaming and homework. I already daily-driven Tumbleweed in Virtualbox for a little bit more than one week and it was pretty good, i could handle it mostly, despite many people saying it is hard to use for a beginner. But i’m still very new to linux and if something seriously breaks, i doubt i could fix it by myself, so it would be good if the desktop enviroment didn’t delete itself, the boot won’t corrupt, and no update would brick my system (ik how to solve bricking on android, but desktop is an another story). So out of Bazzite and Garuda, which is more suitable for me?
Oof, so I came to Linux also with a history of Android Custom ROMs. And well, I had quite a bit of frustration, because my phone was so much more capable and customizable than my (Windows) desktop.
In that regard, Linux has been an absolute fucking delight. And it kind of took Android’s place, in that I now prefer tinkering with my desktop and am frustrated with how incapable Android is.
If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, I have one recommendation to make:
You want something with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. It’s extremely customizable, extremely feature-rich. Other desktops, as well as more minimal GUIs (“window managers”), can be fun, too, but for starting out, I would recommend KDE.
If your Tumbleweed looked like this, that was KDE:
Well, kind of the default for both Bazzite and Garuda is KDE, so this doesn’t tell you terribly much. 😅
But I’m coming at it in this roundabout way to tell you that I’m on Tumbleweed and well, therefore I’m probably biased, but I don’t really see why you’re looking for something else, if you liked Tumbleweed.
openSUSE has the best implementation of KDE (by some fine details, but still). It’s got a really nice snapshotting system (btrfs for the filesystem + Snapper).
Garuda seems to have adopted that from openSUSE, although I don’t know, if it’s quite as fully integrated in Garuda.
But yeah, I would kind of recommend against Bazzite due to it being a relatively new concept (with the caveat that I haven’t dabbled around with it yet; I simply wouldn’t know, if it’s actually already very mature).
I should also say that I actually lied, I’m not on Tumbleweed, but rather Slowroll, which is a semi-official flavor of openSUSE. It’s essentially Tumbleweed, but you get one big upgrade once per month and only security updates in between. While the snapshots can easily rollback the breakages, eventually I got mildly annoyed at having to do so once or twice per year on Tumbleweed, when a bad update made it through, so I’m trying out Slowroll. Might be an option for you, too.
And finally, if you feel like I’m coddling you a lot less in this comment than in the last: Yep.
Since you’re dicking around with Android Custom ROMs, you’ll be fine, no matter what you choose. I mean, Linux will still be a humbling experience, because it has no qualms showing you how much you don’t yet know about computers, but it also loves to teach you. The most important ‘skill’ is having fun when tinkering with technology, which you’ve got.
A lot of the newbie recommendations, and that people tell you Tumbleweed is hard to use, are like that, because we just don’t know who’s asking these questions. Some people want to get away from Windows, but have no interest in learning. And then, yeah, I’ll also sometimes recommend Linux Mint, because its keyboard shortcuts are exactly like Windows, even though it actively got in the way of my desire to tinker, when I initially switched to it…
yes, i had the same desktop, just different stock background. My only problem with kde is that even at 1920x1080 buttons are irrealistically small. And i plan to use a linux distro on 2k display, maybe even 4k. Propably there is a way to make them bigger but idk. And i’m considering Garuda, or maybe Bazzite as a secondary option, because these are preconfigured for gaming out of the box and i really don’t know what to tweak on a vanilla distro to make it game-ready. And Garuda is also very loud about their btrfs implementation with zstd backups (ik a lot about compression algorythms, can even use some of them on paper to manually compress data like a lunatic, and zstd is a very decent algorythm, especially if we measure compression/time ratio). Slowroll actually sounds good because my custom rom is set to major releases every second week (maintainer is Tejas Singh, you propably heard about him, he is a prominent figure in the custom rom genre). And on linux, i should be able to edit custom shortcuts, macros and stuff, right? Also, i tried Tumbleweed in vm for a week and it had a little learning curve but i took it very well, only had one issue when i couldn’t install anything because the same package conflicted with an another from a different repo and stuff, but a simple reboot solved it.
There’s a slider to apply a global scale multiplier in the System Settings under “Display & Monitor”. So, if you set it to 200%, everything will be twice as big.
As for making a distro gaming-ready, honestly I think that’s a bit overpronounced on the webpages of Bazzite and Garuda. It’s one of their distinguishing features, so that’s what they’ll talk about, but I’d be surprised if we’re talking 5 FPS more compared to a general purpose distro.
They generally use the same software and both of them are tuned for performance, with only a slightly different focus when they’ll perform the most optimal.
Yeah, I don’t know what concrete difference zstd makes. The Arch Wiki (great resource, generally applicable independent of distro) tells me that compression may speed up some workloads while slowing down others: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Compression
Maybe Garuda found out that it mostly helps with gaming when openSUSE decided to not make use of it, because openSUSE is more general-purpose.
But yeah, I don’t know, if you’re feeling Garuda, then go for it. At this point, you could tell me that you merely like the theme of Garuda better and I’d support that decision, because what I’ve read about it does sound reasonable, and it sounds like you’ll be fine either way.
And on linux, i should be able to edit custom shortcuts, macros and stuff, right?
Not entirely sure what you mean by macros, but: Yes.
The whole OS is built from the ground up to be scriptable and configurable. It’s very likely better than you can imagine.
They’re certainly somewhat more exotic choices.
Bazzite is currently seeing a hype wave, because it’s strongly inspired by what the Steam Deck does. But that also means, it’s somewhat built like an OS for a console (or in fact like Android), in that it’s a transactional/atomic distribution.
This means, you can’t easily make changes to the OS itself, only to the applications you install and of course your personal files.
It certainly makes it more difficult to break, but it’s still a relatively new thing in the Linux world and particularly you might still run into some limitations when trying to use it as a full-fledged desktop (depending on what you’re looking to do with your PC).
Garuda Linux is based on Arch Linux, which is what we refer to as “bleeding edge” (as opposed to “cutting edge”), because you get the newest version of all the software on your PC just a few days after it got released by the respective developers. Sometimes, those newest versions will have bugs.
You’ll find folks who’ll tell you they’ve been running Arch since they were two years old and never had a problem, but ultimately, why risk it?
And yeah, Trisquel is also getting basically a hard no from me. It’s a distribution for purists. For people who want nothing to do with the corporate world, who’d rather not be able to do something than rely on proprietary software.
If you’re coming from Windows, the chances of you even really knowing what that means are basically non-existent, so I doubt it’s what you want…
on desktop, i’m coming with windows, but i do have good relations with the linux kernel, as i am an android custom rom user for 2 years now, i’ve been on PerryRice kernel, now on Helios. And there are 114 user apps on my phone, and 32 are closed source, so that means 72% of my android is open-source. And my phone is also rooted and has a custom recovery installed. I use my phone for everything, Windows only for gaming and homework. I already daily-driven Tumbleweed in Virtualbox for a little bit more than one week and it was pretty good, i could handle it mostly, despite many people saying it is hard to use for a beginner. But i’m still very new to linux and if something seriously breaks, i doubt i could fix it by myself, so it would be good if the desktop enviroment didn’t delete itself, the boot won’t corrupt, and no update would brick my system (ik how to solve bricking on android, but desktop is an another story). So out of Bazzite and Garuda, which is more suitable for me?
Oof, so I came to Linux also with a history of Android Custom ROMs. And well, I had quite a bit of frustration, because my phone was so much more capable and customizable than my (Windows) desktop.
In that regard, Linux has been an absolute fucking delight. And it kind of took Android’s place, in that I now prefer tinkering with my desktop and am frustrated with how incapable Android is.
If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, I have one recommendation to make:
You want something with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. It’s extremely customizable, extremely feature-rich. Other desktops, as well as more minimal GUIs (“window managers”), can be fun, too, but for starting out, I would recommend KDE.
If your Tumbleweed looked like this, that was KDE:
Well, kind of the default for both Bazzite and Garuda is KDE, so this doesn’t tell you terribly much. 😅
But I’m coming at it in this roundabout way to tell you that I’m on Tumbleweed and well, therefore I’m probably biased, but I don’t really see why you’re looking for something else, if you liked Tumbleweed.
openSUSE has the best implementation of KDE (by some fine details, but still). It’s got a really nice snapshotting system (btrfs for the filesystem + Snapper).
Garuda seems to have adopted that from openSUSE, although I don’t know, if it’s quite as fully integrated in Garuda.
Those snapshots will save you, if your system should ever break.
Basically, if your filesystem and bootloader are still intact, there’s a pretty easy way to rollback: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-snapper.html#sec-snapper-snapshot-boot (should work the same on Garuda)
But yeah, I would kind of recommend against Bazzite due to it being a relatively new concept (with the caveat that I haven’t dabbled around with it yet; I simply wouldn’t know, if it’s actually already very mature).
I should also say that I actually lied, I’m not on Tumbleweed, but rather Slowroll, which is a semi-official flavor of openSUSE. It’s essentially Tumbleweed, but you get one big upgrade once per month and only security updates in between. While the snapshots can easily rollback the breakages, eventually I got mildly annoyed at having to do so once or twice per year on Tumbleweed, when a bad update made it through, so I’m trying out Slowroll. Might be an option for you, too.
And finally, if you feel like I’m coddling you a lot less in this comment than in the last: Yep.
Since you’re dicking around with Android Custom ROMs, you’ll be fine, no matter what you choose. I mean, Linux will still be a humbling experience, because it has no qualms showing you how much you don’t yet know about computers, but it also loves to teach you. The most important ‘skill’ is having fun when tinkering with technology, which you’ve got.
A lot of the newbie recommendations, and that people tell you Tumbleweed is hard to use, are like that, because we just don’t know who’s asking these questions. Some people want to get away from Windows, but have no interest in learning. And then, yeah, I’ll also sometimes recommend Linux Mint, because its keyboard shortcuts are exactly like Windows, even though it actively got in the way of my desire to tinker, when I initially switched to it…
yes, i had the same desktop, just different stock background. My only problem with kde is that even at 1920x1080 buttons are irrealistically small. And i plan to use a linux distro on 2k display, maybe even 4k. Propably there is a way to make them bigger but idk. And i’m considering Garuda, or maybe Bazzite as a secondary option, because these are preconfigured for gaming out of the box and i really don’t know what to tweak on a vanilla distro to make it game-ready. And Garuda is also very loud about their btrfs implementation with zstd backups (ik a lot about compression algorythms, can even use some of them on paper to manually compress data like a lunatic, and zstd is a very decent algorythm, especially if we measure compression/time ratio). Slowroll actually sounds good because my custom rom is set to major releases every second week (maintainer is Tejas Singh, you propably heard about him, he is a prominent figure in the custom rom genre). And on linux, i should be able to edit custom shortcuts, macros and stuff, right? Also, i tried Tumbleweed in vm for a week and it had a little learning curve but i took it very well, only had one issue when i couldn’t install anything because the same package conflicted with an another from a different repo and stuff, but a simple reboot solved it.
There’s a slider to apply a global scale multiplier in the System Settings under “Display & Monitor”. So, if you set it to 200%, everything will be twice as big.
As for making a distro gaming-ready, honestly I think that’s a bit overpronounced on the webpages of Bazzite and Garuda. It’s one of their distinguishing features, so that’s what they’ll talk about, but I’d be surprised if we’re talking 5 FPS more compared to a general purpose distro.
They generally use the same software and both of them are tuned for performance, with only a slightly different focus when they’ll perform the most optimal.
Yeah, I don’t know what concrete difference zstd makes. The Arch Wiki (great resource, generally applicable independent of distro) tells me that compression may speed up some workloads while slowing down others: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Compression
Maybe Garuda found out that it mostly helps with gaming when openSUSE decided to not make use of it, because openSUSE is more general-purpose.
But yeah, I don’t know, if you’re feeling Garuda, then go for it. At this point, you could tell me that you merely like the theme of Garuda better and I’d support that decision, because what I’ve read about it does sound reasonable, and it sounds like you’ll be fine either way.
Not entirely sure what you mean by macros, but: Yes.
The whole OS is built from the ground up to be scriptable and configurable. It’s very likely better than you can imagine.