Plot twist: it was I, OP, all along! Let me explain why.

Whenever I see these distro recommendation threads, all kinds of people come out to make a comment. Many if not most are well-intentioned, but the kind of person that bothers me the most is the evangelist. The kind of person who’s blind to the limitations and drawbacks of the thing they are espousing.

If you’re gonna recommend a distro, I sure hope you’d have some personal experience with it. Otherwise, how do you know what it’s limitations are? So to admit you’ve never used Bazzite even though you’re recommending it, it just seems irresponsible. “You have a peanut allergy? Try this Pad Thai restaurant! I’ve never been there but I hear it’s great!”

After discussing with a few more developer friends of mine, they advised me not to use an atomic/immutable distro, because setting it up for development is a chore. I’d apparently have to learn how to use distrobox, set up containers, and learn an entire other flavor of linux to set up a development environment. As a reminder, I did say in the OP that I needed something I could program on as well, and Bazzite sounds like a poor fit for that use case.

What steers me away from Arch is that I don’t want an OS that is a project in and of itself. The OS should be simple and stable to help me do my actual projects.

Reading Bazzite’s website, it seems very strict that NTFS is unsupported and outright catastrophic.

NTF

If you are coming from Windows and plan to game on a secondary drive with games already installed on it, then we regret to inform you that the NTFS filesystem is unsupported for PC gaming on Bazzite.

Playing games off of NTFS causes various issues, including but not limited to games not launching at all, and will eventually result in data corruption and permanent data loss!

Mint seems like the most user-friendly, but I really wish it came with KDE. Looks the most familiar to me.

I’d appreciate that thank you

You lost me lol

See my other top level comment lol

Thank you for understanding where I’m coming from lol. Mint supposedly, with enough tinkering, can handle all my use cases?

I’m familiar with Proton, as I understand it you can use it on most distros. I’m not the biggest fan of Arch-based distros since Arch is rolling release. Also not a fan of caveats like the Dae being borked… I didn’t sign up to be Linus Tech Tips lol, I saw how Pop OS shit the bed.

Steam Link has never been able to figure out that my ultrawide monitor and TV don’t have the same aspect ratio, so I have to go into Windows settings to change the resolution. Don’t suppose that’s easier on Linux?

Edit: Fun fact: Bazzite’s Live USB doesn’t have Steam installed on it so I can’t test out that functionality, and Steam only offers a deb package that you can’t install because Bazzite is immutable. Bazzite says they’re not going to change that so I think I’m crossing Bazzite off my list.

Well, their founder was recently discovered to be funding far right groups in Sweden. The rest of the company is apparently very unhappy with this. My subscription lasts until next year so I’m holding off on renewing until the dust settles there.

You dont have to choose. You can keep a tiny Windows partition, and/or a shared NTFS partition that both linux and Windows can access.

How is support for NTFS these days? Any degradation in performance or stability if I run games off a separate NTFS drive?

I will say it was a good decision to just separate my work PC from my home PC. I didn’t want to end up like that guy who got his company hacked just because he was running a vulnerable version of Plex Media Server. So I have a Windows laptop just for remoting into work and nothing else.

Never heard of either one. What makes them better than Ubuntu or Mint?

I don’t know, maybe I’m misremembering a detail, it was 10 years ago. I think I needed KVM as well, maybe that’s what was missing. Either way, I had to add newer repos to an older version. I think the codenames were Jessie and Wheezy.

Fun story about why I’m such a curmudgeon about this:

Long before Proton even existed, I once researched how to run a Windows VM for gaming on a Linux host machine, with GPU passthrough. At the time I had an Intel iGPU and an Nvidia discrete GPU, so I figured the iGPU could run the host, while the discrete GPU could run the guest.

I asked around reddit and some of my tech savvy friends on what the best distro would be to accomplish this. A few people steered me toward Debian, because I expressed concern that the system wouldn’t be stable or would be difficult to work with.

Well, turns out Debian was a fucking terrible choice. First I had graphics driver problems, naturally. Secondly, I couldn’t even install qemu if I wanted to because it wasn’t in the apt repositories that shipped with Debian. So I had to learn to add those. Then I had to learn how to stop Debian from recognizing the nvidia GPU during boot, so that the PCI device could be reserved for the passthrough. That was a monumental headache to figure out. And finally, once everything was set up, I learned that nvidia had more or less disabled their consumer-grade cards from being used in a virtual machine. I spent over a month trying to get that working, and eventually just said fuck it and stayed on Windows. And I caught a ton of flak for that, because obviously I should have known that nvidia was a bad choice of GPU, and I should have just purchased an AMD GPU instead… in the middle of GPU mining bubble, when cards were going for $500 a pop.

I’m really hoping to not have a repeat of that experience.