I’ve been working and testing to switch my main PC (used for work like audio recording, music, and general multimedia) and have been playing with Ubuntu Studio on my laptop. Loving it so far but I keep seeing people talk about CachyOS, Bazzite, or the new Debian Trixie.
I’m having trouble finding what’s really different about all these distros aside from how they look or slight changes in how they do things (I know Ubuntu Studio has a low latency kernel which seems important for what I need to do). Is there a big difference? Like, if I go with Ubuntu Studio am I gonna end up wiping everything and installing CachyOS or Bazzite or something in a month because it’s better? Or are all these distros basically the same thing with a different look and feel and as long as I choose one that gets regular updates, it doesn’t matter fundamentally?
I’m trying to grasp the Linux concept but being a Windows user my whole life I’m struggling to ‘get it’. Instead of trying to understand in the contex of Windows or Mac, is a better comparison Apple/Android? Like iPhones would be similar to both Mac and Windows (you don’t get to choose much) and Android would be Linux (I know it’s built on it haha) and it’s really just a bunch of different options to do the same thing?
General rule of thumb for new users.
Doesn’t like to tinker and non gamer. Fedora
Likes to thinker and non gamer endeavour
Doesn’t like to tinker and gamer bazzite
Likes to tinker and gamer cachy
Arch at this point is no more unstable or prone to breaking then mint or any other distro barring like Debian. Cachy and endeavour with kde6 basically have solved the arch isn’t for new users problem coming from Windows.
So really you just need to ask yourself. Do you want your defaults to include gaming utilities or do you want to have to install them yourself. If your going to game you can save yourself hours as a new user with bazzite or cachy since they come out of the box with a button for “I want to install all the gaming stuff” and your good to go.
If you don’t game and just do basic work then you can go with fedora which will provide a great curated experience that basically just leaves you with a standard and reliable work PC.
Or endeavour which will drop you off right at the point of everything works, is reliable and ready for you to start learning. Even if you choose to never fiddle with anything, you still end up with a system that supports the widest possible amount of hardware and has one of the best user manuals of any distro family.
Seriously for as much as people claim you need a big community for refence material. Between cachy and arches wiki, you have a better source of information than any other option. It’s absurd how useful it is.
Y’all really need to get off the Bazzite thing for new users.
Fedora for gaming is great and has zero issues.
Bazzite is no better than any other distro in this respect EXCEPT that it’s immutable, and going to be a NIGHTMARE for somebody not yet familiar with how things work in a Linux system. It’s edge cases upon edge cases, and the assumption by people pushing this idiocy is that they’ll never need to know how a normal functioning Linux system works if they like it, which is an ignorant supposition.
Stop pushing this narrative to new users, you’re just making it harder on them.