I currently use Mint, as do several family members and friends. Its been nothing short of impeccable. I was occasionally tweaking things until now sometimes the game crashes, PC freezes requiring hard reset. Everything used to work pretty flawless out the box. Should I reinstall my mint or look at PopOS, Bazzite, Nobara, Etc? I’m at the point in my life. Where we all need something to just turn on and play. I want some shit that just works. Or reinstall mint but how without losing all my files and settings? and keep it moving as usual as it used to be flawless. Tweaking is fun until you tweaked so much shit breaks lol. I’m over tweaking. Just wanna game. I keep seeing immutable is good so that’s why I ask. Thanks!!

5600x 6700xt Its an all AMD build over here :)

Edit: You guys convinced me I’m booting it up now with KDE! I also plan to try PopOs. I’m excited. Thanks everyone!

  • Ark-5
    2•2 months ago

    Not immutable, but I slapped Garuda on a 2016 gaming laptop to give it a second life and it’s been great for the most part. I got a bit fiddly with it and had to fight my way through some partial upgrade issues, but know I arch based distros better and it’s stable as can be. I honestly don’t update it that often since it just serves are my TV box, and I’m seriously considering swapping to a Nix install now that I’ve mostly stabilized my package list for the purposes of gaming and video encoding. Proton is one of the only things I think get regular updates on that device, but those are entirely handled by Steam, so immutable is very attractive to me for a gaming only system.

    I’ll also add that my primary device has arch on it and I do most of my gaming (but also work) there. It’s great, and I can’t help but feel a lot of the distros that are “made for gaming” suffer from a lot of the issues that windows does. They are trying to be preconfigured to work with any and all hardware. This leads to bloated package lists, and just extra guffins to work around as you trouble shoot. I’d say my arch install took a bit longer to get gaming super stable, but I’ve also had to fix much fewer issues compared to the Garuda install.

    All the people mentioning Bazzite are making me eye it to replace Garuda tho.

    • UnfortunateShort
      1•2 months ago

      I adopted a lot of customisations from Garuda to my EndeavourOS setup. I got fed up with Garuda because it constantly broke.

      Bootloader broke twice, desktop broke all the time, and when I needed to load a snapshot and it simply didn’t work, they finally lost me. Never had any of these issues with my current setup, really a surprising contrast, given that Endeavour is also Arch based.

    • @Mambert@beehaw.org
      1•2 months ago

      I can’t recommend Garuda because they have somehow configured their sddm to not want to work with other desktop environments. Admin on the forums said it themselves. I’d recommend arcolinux because it doesn’t shove you into such restraints. Installation is a simple menu to install everything right away.

      • Ark-5
        2•2 months ago

        Ah good to know. I’m using Hyprland on my main device, but never even considered installing anything other than the default on the Garuda box.