Help finding a balance with Linux

Ask Fedora
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Hi everyone,

I’m new to the forum, good to be here. I want to ask the community here about making an informed choice for my Linux distro. I know this topic is a dime a dozen, but hopefully it’s substantive enough that it’s worth responding to.

I (please, god) want to be done with distro hopping, so I figure I should start by giving way too much detail about my habits and preferences. Sorry if this post is a little disorganized, I’ll do my best…

First, about me. I feel that I’m perpetually conflicted about my wants and needs with my daily driver OS. I have been into technology since elementary school, I’m the IT guy for my family (a mandatory and non-paying position, unfortunately), I simultaneously love technology and hate it with an absolute passion.

For much of my life I was exclusively a Windows user on desktop; 95, 98, XP, 7, 10, 11. For much of my life it’s serviced my needs. Obviously, I don’t need to detail here how Microsoft is rotting from the inside out. My Windows installs were always as maximally tweaked for privacy and autonomy as possible, but we all know this is always a losing uphill battle. Starting in university and continuing on, I also finally decided to try MacOS even though using the OS felt to me like wading through sand. To me, each had/has its pros and cons. Windows was as good as it got for gaming. MacOS, after much adjusting, to me did feel quite nice for work and basic personal tasks. Each had (and still does have, to some extent) its usefulness to me.

As for the mobile side - I used Android until one day I didn’t. To me the iOS switch has largely been one which I’ve really enjoyed. On mobile, I do want a streamlined experience and long term support and relatively progressive privacy/security features. My phone is for ease of use, mostly. It’s worth mentioning that I do sideload apps, I am frustrated with many artificial Apple limitations, and things are not perfect. Anyhow, for now I am firmly with iOS, however the news of Motorola and GrapheneOS has sparked a little bit of contemplation in my mind…

About a year ago I decided to take the plunge into the world of Linux for desktop OS. I had already used Proxmox for a home server for quite some time but I’m not really counting that since it’s a different category of use. I tried Linux Mint, quickly felt it was “boring”, “outdated”, “not the kind of OS I liked booting into”. I put those in quotes because I know my gut feelings on things are just my personal feelings and are not real criticism by any means. It just wasn’t for me. I jumped over to Pop!_OS shortly after and while it was pretty good, it felt a little weak to me and the appeal of COSMIC and Wayland quickly faded after a (almost certainly user initiated) situation where files were no longer delete-able and system stability was tanking. Ubuntu LTS is old hat for me and I did not particularly like the feel of it when I used it for certain tasks in the past, and do not feel particularly fond of Canonical.

A big issue for me is that I don’t know where I stand, and being somewhere in the middle is kind of maddening. I like using Proxmox for my home server because I want to set things up my way; yet I use a Synology NAS despite the reputation because I value stability and ease of use with my files. I use iOS as my main phone, but I have a spare Android phone for very specific tasks on occasion. I like learning and growing my skills and tinkering, but sometimes I just want to be a basic user and have things work.

Ok, that’s a lot of background - here’s where I’m at right now… I’m looking to choose between Fedora KDE Plasma and Bazzite for my daily driver. I want stability, security, tweakability when I feel like it and simplicity when I don’t. I don’t want an OS so bleeding edge that it breaks but I don’t want to hold onto something that’s starting to show its age. I will be using an Nvidia GPU for gaming, but will also be using a workstation card on occasion when it’s not hooked up to my server (Intel ARC Pro if you’re wondering). In all honesty, I will likely use a second drive to dual boot in Windows when it happens to reduce friction monumentally, and will use MacOS when I want a very light but focused experience. I like Flatpaks from my time using them, but I hate permission handling in some cases. I like the option to install system packages in some cases, but hate the feeling of dependency hell. I’m not averse to working on setting up Nvidia and game compatibility, but it’s not all I do on my PC and I don’t want it to become a total hassle.

I’m sorry for the giant post, but I really could use some friendly Linux expertise right about now. Please feel free to ask follow up questions if you want. Thanks everyone!

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Just my 2 cents. For gaming Bazzite would be your best bet. Stability wise it’s my opinion that Fedora is on par although it’s not immutable. If you have tried both in at least a vm you should be able to make your choice. Best of luck to you.

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Thank you. Despite the general consensus, I prefer jumping into an OS as opposed to testing in VMs. To my detriment most likely but hey it’s just what I prefer. I plan to practice good backup/snapshot habits so hopefully the immutable aspect won’t be too much of a problem if I really mess things up… Anyhow, I appreciate your input!

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Hopefully you get “paid” with food and drinks. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

So your wants, needs and interests:

  • Tired of distro hopping.
  • Simultaneously love/hate technology.
  • Currently on an iPhone because of usability, but keeps a spare Android phone for specific tasks (MWC2026 conference announcement that Motorola and GrapheneOS teaming up is drawing gaze over the digital fence at the potentially greener grass).
  • Uses PVE for VMs, but Synology NAS for files.
  • Nvidia GPU for gaming, but also an Intel Arc Pro on occasion.
  • Like Flatpaks, but not managing permissions.
  • Like option to install system packages, but not dealing with dependency hell.
  • Open to setting up Nvidia drivers for games, but don’t want it to become a hassle.
  • Want stability, security and configurability, but also simplicity when not needed.
  • Don’t want bleeding edge, but also don’t like outdated software.
  • Planning on installing Linux on a dedicated drive and dual booting with Windows while still using macOS for a light focused experience.
  • Linux Mint, Pop!_OS and Ubuntu LTS are not visually appealing.

(There are a lot of contradictions in the list above. :wink: )

Note:

  • Without specific examples of things you’d like to tweak, it’s not easy to choose a desktop environment for Linux – something that macOS and Windows users don’t really need to wrangle over.
  • It’d be helpful to know what types of games you’re interested in.

But given the list above, I’d say Bazzite isn’t a good fit as your daily driver because its primary objective is high-performance compatibility for gaming. As a rolling distro on the bleeding edge, there will be occasional software conflicts and stability issues.

Fedora KDE Plasma, with KDE being famous for having lots of settings, can also be overwhelming compared to the more streamlined options in macOS.

Having used multiple flavors of Ubuntu for years along with Mint, Slackware and many others, plus just as many desktop environments (I currently use the “Sway” Fedora Spin on a Microsoft Surface Pro; Xfce on an old netbook), I think Fedora Workstation with GNOME Shell most closely balances your requirements as a daily workhorse. Typical settings are just clicks away in the GUI, but there are over 1,800 settings for tweaking as needed behind the scenes.

However, the only way to know if GNOME Shell fits into your daily workflow is to try it out. Personally, I think GNOME Shell sits somewhere between a traditional WIMP UI and a tiling window manager (there’s an extension for GNOME Shell).

If you decide to multi-boot, maybe just keep Windows for gaming and Fedora for desktop use. Or if you want to leave Windows entirely, multi-boot Fedora Workstation alongside Bazzite or the gaming-focused Fedora spin.

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Me too :slight_smile:

As you say you like iOS, I would recommend Workstation Edition of Fedora. (Gnome).

KDE is good, but has more exposed settings.
Bazzite is good, but only needed for handheld devices.

So basic Fedora, with KDE or Gnome. Pick the same one for you whole family and dive in.

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First off: Welcome! :slight_smile:

I (please, god) want to be done with distro hopping …

the appeal of COSMIC and Wayland quickly faded after a (almost certainly user initiated) situation where files were no longer delete-able and system stability was tanking

I value stability and ease of use with my files

I like learning and growing my skills and tinkering, but sometimes I just want to be a basic user and have things work.

I will be using an Nvidia GPU for gaming

I like the option to install system packages in some cases, but hate the feeling of dependency hell.

I picked these quotes from your post because they stood out to me as things that I can 100% relate to, with one caveat: I don’t have any Nvidia hardware at the moment.

That said, from everything you’re saying I am fairly confident that there really is a silver bullet for your use case:

Fedora Atomic (any flavor) + Distrobox

I’ve been through a lot of what you’re describing. Over the past 8 or 9 years I’ve used Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Void Linux, and Debian, and was always annoyed by the combination of paper-cut bugs, showstopper bugs, my own idiosyncrasies preventing me from getting work done, and so on… At some point I found out about Fedora Atomic and became very interested in the concept. I spent around 9 months using Bluefin and learning about the tech that powers this “breed” of distro, and eventually I decided that I didn’t like the amount of turbulence in the project Bluefin development model. I took what I learned from Bluefin and finally leaned in to setting up my own “derivative distro” that has cured me of any desire to hop ever again.

I’m not telling you this simply because I like bikeshedding (I mean, I do like it, but that’s not the point :laughing:). I’m just pretty sure that given what you’ve shared, you would probably really take to the atomic approach. It scratches essentially every itch that you mentioned, while also providing an escape hatch for when the urge to tinker leads you to break your setup somehow.

I would encourage you to give Bazzite the old “college try” as it seems to check most of the boxes you’ve mentioned (especially Nvidia, which is a recurring headache for “normal” Fedora if r/fedora is anything to go by :roll_eyes:). I explicitly mentioned Distrobox above because having it means there’s no longer any real need for distro hopping unless you really can’t stand KDE / GNOME / whatever other DE you are on.

Someday, if you stick with it, your urge to tinker might lead you down the path of creating your own Fedora Atomic “downstream” that has only the stuff in it that you want, and you will live in this strange world where your computer just does exactly what you want it to do and you have to start looking for other hobbies because endless tinkering is not really a thing anymore. :wink:

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First off thanks to everyone who has replied. I specifically want to respond to your post because I found it really intriguing.

If you resonated with many of my struggles and seemingly conflicting feelings that makes me more confident in trying out your approach as my first, and hopefully semi-final, attempt.

I’m going to read up on this more. I like what you’re proposing regarding the eventual expansion into a semi-customized downstream when it feels right.

Hey, thanks a lot for this post. It’s really insightful and I’ll try to report back in the somewhat near future when I have a solid idea of how it worked out for me and to add any other commentary.

Off to chase the silver bullet. Many thanks!

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Glad to be of help :slight_smile:

I’m happy to help with the learning curve, which I have to warn you about: it exists, but it’s not that bad.

I’ve only used Bazzite in a VM but since it’s similar to Bluefin (which I did use on two different machines) I can probably help you with it. I’m not really sure if this forum has a policy about keeping discussion strictly on-topic of official Fedora editions/spins, but much of the knowledge applies to upstream Fedora Atomic so I would say it’s still on topic in my opinion :sweat_smile:

I’m going to read up on this more. I like what you’re proposing regarding the eventual expansion into a semi-customized downstream when it feels right.

For this specifically, depending on how eager you are, the barrier to adoption is pretty low. You can have a look at the README of my image and the links in it to get started, but I would recommend holding off on this until you decide if you like the atomic approach at all.

Off to chase the silver bullet. Many thanks!

:saluting_face:

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Related note: Some of the main contributors to the Fedora Atomic SIG or Initiative or whatever it’s called (still getting the hang of the Fedora jargon) hang out on these forums as well, so if you start to go down this rabbit hole you might encounter them around here.

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Since you’ve asked here on the Fedora forums, I would suggest trying out a Fedora desktop offering first, and then consider downstream distros like Bazzite if Fedora doesn’t tick the required boxes.

Then I would pick the DE. For me, being an iPhone user and also using MacOS at work, GNOME was the obvious choice.

Then since you want stability, I would try an atomic version first (Kinoite if the DE of choice is KDE or Silverblue for GNOME), and check if it’s tweakable enough for your needs. You can always remove it and install a tradition Fedora desktop if the atomic one limits you too much.

I switched from Fedora Workstation to Silverblue some while ago, and didn’t feel the need to go back.

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I’ve been on Linux since mid-2023. Until the end of 2025, I was using Windows 11 in dual boot. But I rarely used Windows 11. Mostly I had to install Windows Updates when starting Windows. So I removed my separated Windows SSD and used Linux all alone.

I would say that I am an extreme distro hopper. I used nearly all the most well-known distributions out there, like Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Pop!_OS, MX Linux, Solus, Arch Linux, Manjaro, Garuda Linux, EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Zorin, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Bazzite, Nobara, and PikaOS. Surely I forgot some of them. Debian and Ubuntu are not my preferred distributions. I want to have the latest drivers and packages, but I don’t need to be on the bleeding edge. That’s why I’m actually with Fedora and have the latest drivers and packages together with stability.

I used Fedora as one of my first distributions because at the beginning it was one of the only distributions that worked with my AMD RX 7800 XT. I kept coming back to Fedora and have been using it again for several days and weeks now with my new AMD RX 9070 XT without any issues.

Because I need to modify some aspects of my distribution, I think that atomic distributions are not the right Linux for me and my intention. Furthermore, I’m not a gamer, so I don’t need a so-called gaming distribution.

I am a distro hopper because I always think that I am missing out on something and become dissatisfied with what I have. Hopefully I’ll find what I require and what I want in Fedora so that I don’t have to hop between distributions anymore. Let’s see what the future or maybe the next days will bring. :wink:

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Hi Zach,

Welcome to Fedora!!!

You and I are a lot alike so, I can relate (I’ve been at it a bit longer than you so … LOL) …
Personally, I have been using Fedora since it was released, Redhat and Slackware before that, and Solaris/SunOS, BSD, OS2, IBMDOS (pre M$ release) …
I also converted my Wife, AKA “End-User-From-Hell”, from M$ to Fedora.
Why Fedora?

  1. it is consistent across deployments — I use it on servers, desktops and laptops
  2. personally I love RPM package management over Snaps/Flatpaks because it is a LOT simpler to manage AND the QA is better and RPMS seem to be a whole lot more stable and consistent and they are more credible and easily auditable in a commercial environment.
  3. support for new hardware is very good and when things do break, you can most times find a solution/help by just coming to this site (discussion.fedoraproject.org) and asking for help
  4. I am not much for KDE (yet) I have been using GNOME for years… it has it’s moments though …
  5. I don’t have to use any 3rd party S/W for running Virtual machines … I have built some very large deployments just using KVM/QEMU and the really nice ting is that I can build the VM on my laptop, test it and then migrate it to as large a system as I like without any modification. AND the VM perform very well!!!
  6. I am not much of a gamer ( I am a little old-school … computer is for learning, solving problems, doing work, making a living and getting things done LOL) so computer games don’t have much attraction for me outside of Flight Gear – I use that to practice instrument flight
    …

I could go on but, I think you get the idea … Fedora has been my daily driver for years and if/when I get the itch to try other OS’s/Distro’s (like Ubuntu,SuSE, CentOS, FreeBSD, Windows …) I just create a VM and go for it all while keeping my base systems clean and consistent on Fedora …

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The trick to not being overwhelmed with KDE’s plentora of settings is to just not use them. I have an established set of cosmetic changes, selected purely to make my eyes happy, that I make on a new install, then I (almost) never look at Settings again. I don’t even look at anything else in there, because in a properly-configured distro, everything will sufficiently work out of the box. And now that we can save themes, I won’t even need to do that much.

I don’t do modern games, so that’s not in my equation.

When I feel the urge to distro-trawl, I have a hotswap bay and a stack of old HDDs. But I never think in terms of replacing a satisfactory OS.

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How do you do that? I have found a program called konsave on Github but it messes around with your system so things stop working.
Which way do you use to save the settings?

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I just saw that this is a new feature. I haven’t looked yet cuz the Fedora box is awaiting a new power supply….

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I have installed konsave again and now it does not do what it did the first time I installed it:
Somehow it did this:
warning: The LOCPATH variable is set to "/home/<user>/.locale"
Now it works, as far as I have seen.
There is also a UI program which works on top of konsave but I didn’t install that:
Konsave CLI: Konsave
Konsave GUI: KonUI

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