For me personally there are two red flags: an almost non-existent wiki and the only way to connect with the community or get support is Discord. I have the same issue with PikaOS.
I actually popped into the discord, felt icky after leaving it during the ID change, and talked to the head dev. Apparently theyre looking for people to do documentation. Honestly his take on it and the fact that it's his daily OS is pretty reassuring.
I tried installing Drauger before Bazzite but never got it to the point of stability before breaking it and moving on to try other things. (I know he put out a new version recently so I might pull something together to try it again to see if it improved.) Really, though, I'd say just go with Debian itself. Between Steam, Lutris, and Heroic, you don't need to install gaming tools yourself much anymore, and if you are a fan of the Ubuntu toolkit, that's mostly Debian. I've done a bit of gaming on Debian and never had any issue.
What are you having trouble with on Bazzite that you expect to be different on anything else, though?
That's actually my primary reason for looking for other options, bazzite had everything pre installed so I didn't have to hunt down which game software to install or what they so, I could just switch around and see what works. Now that I know what I like and what works, I can just install those myself instead of getting bogged down.
The big issue I have on bazzite is installing the little softwares I use for all my hobbies. Cura, linuxcnc, vsmodelmaker, media rippers, etc. I can't install them straight to the machine because of the immutable setup so its flatpak or box buddy. There's a 50:50 that the flatpak is broken, and I can't for the life of me get anything to actually run in box buddy. If it does actually launch, any graphic sections like the build space in cura are just black. In comparison my partner's laptop is Ubuntu and our server is Ubuntu server with docker. If I can't just find the working copy in a software market it's like two lines in terminal and I'm already using the software.
PikaOS is gaming Debian, and Debian is just pre-Ubuntu-Ubuntu without the Ubuntu-shittiness that Ubuntu adds.
If you like apt and dpkg and deb package management, that's all Debian's work, not Ubuntu, and I don't see why you wouldn't be just as happy with Debian. If you like snap... well, then, there's something wrong with you and I don't know how to help you. :P
Debian is the base for a huge number of distributions (including Ubuntu itself) for good reason. PikaOS is built on that good foundation. I'm running PikaOS with KDE on basically all my (modern-ish) machines, and I would happily recommend it to anybody.
I have no strong feelings about snap, like flat pack I find it to be a coin toss as to whether it works fine on the first try or has never worked and never will. Does straight Debian have a desktop environment and consistent guides? The biggest thing that keeps me close to ubuntu is that I can always search "[whatever I'm trying to do] Ubuntu" and find a dozen guides explaining exactly what i need to make it happen and they're rarely out of date or wrong.
I'm pretty sure Debian's default desktop environment out of the box is Gnome, but like any decent distro you can usually either get it preinstalled with different environments, choose it during installation (I think it's part of tasksel on Debian) or changing the desktop environment should not be much harder than installing the appropriate package or metapackage, typically on Debian this is something like task-kde-desktop but there are more details for KDE specifically here. PikaOS likewise has a KDE installer image.
I think guides are even better on Debian personally but YMMV. I understand the attraction of having a good ecosystem for stuff like that, and Debian is itself very popular, maybe not quite Ubuntu level, but being the upstream for almost every apt/deb based distro means that there is usually pretty good compatibility between guides for different flavors and often the Debian one is where things get started and you can often use Debian guides directly on Ubuntu or PikaOS with no issues and no modifications needed. Occasionally you might need to tweak some package names or paths slightly, apt-cache search <name> or dpkg -l <package> can often help a lot with any inconsistencies you might encounter.
The reverse is often also possible: I know I have probably used Ubuntu guides directly on Debian in the past, although I can't remember the last time I actually did that, because the Debian-specific guide is usually what the Ubuntu ones are actually based on and I can't remember finding a Ubuntu guide where I couldn't also find something corresponding for Debian. Sometimes I do kind of look at them both and try to understand if they're doing certain things differently for some particular reason and that helps me understand if there might be version or library issues that might be something to keep an eye on.
Bazzite isn’t Ubuntu based?
Fedora atomic spin
No, it's fedora.
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