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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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There's an atomic Fedora spin made for gaming, Bazzite, and the experience has been to install, and just go. Everything works, everything is set up for gaming and performance monitoring, it's actually baffling how good this is!
I realise I' sounding like a shill, but genuinely it's great and seems to be what you're looking for. You can always just try it in a VM!
Bazzite seems superior for handhelds or just pure gaming setups, I game like 20% of the time maybe less these days
Ill check it out, only time I heard it mentioned was someone saying cachyos is superior if you dont mind a bit of tinkering
Fedora. It just works. I use it for work and it doesn't let me down. Semi annual upgrading it is easy and it seems to be moving slowly, because gnome/LibreOffice is, to flatpaks. It's slow to change and stable because of it, they still include Grub when it became a relic since systemd included gummyboot (systemd-boot) many years ago.
Contrast that with ArchLinux which is 'cleaner' and a rolling distro which I prefer; Fedora isn't. I use it for a Rescue USB. I used to use it for work but, and this is long ago, I managed to break it quite easily by 'fixing it' too much! ArchLinux doesn't let me down but I don't have a gui or Window manager on it, console only, and I know my way around Linux reasonably well.
Debian is still confused about systemd. Run a combination of testing and unstable branches on the desktop and you've got a great system but this is before the systemd days where they moved all the systemd defaults to the old/odd places that make no sense. As you say, snap appears to be another mad experiment by Ubuntu, like mir when everyone went to wayland.
If you're going to use your PC for games, I think there may be better distros than these. I'm not a gamer so I can't advise.
I'm not a huge fan of derivative distros, like Ubuntu (based on Debian decreasingly) or so on. I'm not one to mess about with screen savers etc and aesthetics though. To me derivatives add bloat and unexpected changes.
Source distros are a rabbit hole I've been down. They were fun but I couldn't get myself to do any work when I had them.
I've never tried SUSE, it's alternative rpm style distro which can be stable as a rolling.
Distrowatch.com is always worth a visit. Find a/several forum that is your intended use and find out which district they use there; if you have issues they'll know how to fix it.
2nd Fedora. I used Mint, Pop!_OS, Open SUSE tumbleweed, Nobara, EndeavourOS, MX Linux, Manjaro (eww) and Fedora finally clicked as my primary distribution. It’s not without its occasional hiccups. A while back, waking my machine from suspend stopped working. It took a month but they fixed it with an update, I didn’t bother with any work arounds because I knew they would.
Gaming and multimedia experience has been great. Between the RPM Fusion repos, COPR, and flatboat, I can always find the software I need. It’s solid, fresher than anything Ubuntu based, and rarely has issues.
I think I heard fedora will never be supported by a ps3 emulator because of some core issues and that turned me away initially, some youtuber was swapping away from it, though now im not sure and it may have been some other distro, cant find info online
Nobara looks interesting for fedora, do you have experience with it? Or anyone else seeing this comment. Nvm its developed by one dude
Not just any dude. That's Glorious Eggroll! As in GE from GE-Proton.
You want stable and no snaps.
Debian
I keep seeing people recommending Debian. Its a great OS, especially for server stuff (which I use in multiple VMs in my home lab), but I wouldn't recommend it on a computer you're actively using. They take so long to update packages you're always multiple versions behind. This really makes it difficult to get bug fixes and patches for software that you're using on a daily basis. The hardware support is never as good as other options.
but I wouldn't recommend it on a computer you're actively using
Debian is my daily driver on all my computers. Servers, desktop, laptop. Its called the universal operating system for a reason
Packages are regularly updated with bug fixes for security issues. Do you absolutely need the latest features for every software? Debian is fine unless theres some killer new feature you absolutely need.
Hardware support is mostly fine unless you have the absolute latest hardware (which OP doesnt). And backport kernels should take care of newer hardware
Or a computer you use once a year or smth.
Have you looked at tumbleweed? Its a rolling release so its always up to date but opensuse's testing is fantastic. It's very stable and on the off chance there's a regression that impacts usability, it has built in version snapshots. It takes literally 45 seconds to roll back to a previous working version.
I see people saying CachyOS is finicky, but I've had almost no issues in two years of extensive use.
And anything that pops up gets fixed extremely quickly.
What’s better, everything you need for gaming is in the repos by default and pre-tweaked, no need to fuss with it like other distros. This is my nitpick with Fedora or Arch AUR: once you go outside the curated, officially supported packages, you are asking for trouble.
The only issue I've had is that the system will completly freeze up, although it only happens every once in a great while. I never had it happen on any other Arch based distro.
Actually I had this one!
Something about their swap config makes it very fragile unless you use RAM swap as enabled by default, and I kept having this when I disabled it for reasons. It was much better once I re enabled it, though occasionally I still have severe issues going way, way, over my RAM pool.
I don’t mention that much because swapping to like 64GB on a 32GB system seems like an uncommon use case.
~~Have you tried nobara? Seems to be another good one for gaming that is fedora based ~~ nvm its one dude developing it who changes what he supports at a whim
I skipped nobara for that very reason.
And I was more familiar with Arch anyway.
Yeah, thats why picking a gaming focused one seems like a good idea, theres a community thatll fix stuff before I need to think of it
I'm quite happy with CachyOS but use whatever makes you happy. Just pick something with a desktop envionment you like (KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, GNOME)
Cachy - you might have some extra hoops to jump through. The performance difference is negligible for just desktop usage.
PopOS - no real benefit unless you're running Nvidia, and then it's only for the moderately useful graphics switching stuff.
You sound like you want Fedora for simplicity's sake, honestly. There's really no other major performance differences between desktop distros. Any tunings that one has you can just apply to another if you know their benefits.
Don't necesssrily care about simplicity because I do plan to tinker a lot, I just dont want too frequent updates that arent thoughly tested, I like the 6months to yearly more than the frequent rolling updates, I do plan on messing with the theming a lot since I do that on windows with rainmeter (something would always break with windows updates for anything else)
Get Arch if you really want to tinker and learn about linux.