Thank you for your input! NixOS sounds very intriguing to me but it also appears to be an absolute beast. I’d need time to dive into the Nix world, but I definitely will do so!

Yes, so far I am happy with it.

Thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:

• shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
• but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
• my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
• some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
• fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
• I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
• I already love the atomic way of handling updates
• so far no issues

The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.

Oh, this sounds good! Thanks a lot!

I think I will opt for one of the atomic distros like Bazzite or Aurora, since yes, it seems very interesting and a nice project, but learning Nix just to get eventually a working system running again won’t be the right thing for me. But I will definitely load it into a VM and try it out when I have more time at hands!

The problem is with Arch. Not that it is by design bad, it is just that with software under heavy development will add new issues more easily, especially if you roll out updates very fast, which happens with a rolling distro. And like the other user already said: not updating your system is a bad idea.

Sounds good! Bazzite seems to be very similar, just with more gaming related stuff pre-installed.

Wayland is super fast, free of tearing and can handle completely different monitors working together without issues. It is not wayland that makes it unstable, just that there is much more going on development-wise which can cause things to break more easily in a rolling distro. But I also had issues non-related to wayland but with Plasma, for example that after a plasma (and Dolphin) update, my NTFS partition could not be mounted anymore. Using pcmanfm-qt solved it.

Having a distro that tests things more or at least makes it easy to rollback, would help in such situations. When I was a student, these things did not nother me to much. But now with a demanding job, I just don’t want to put too much time on this things anymore.

This ready like an almost atomic distro, haha. Good job! Also sounds interesting, so definitely something that I will consider! Thank you very much for sharing!

Void sounds interesting to tinker around with it but I don’t want to tinker anymore. It is fine for me to have a reasonable learning curve in the beginning, but I just want something that works once set up and that goes out of my way.

Additionally, Void is still a rolling release distro so the same downside to it applies to Arch and vice versa. Arch is not unstable per se, it just depends on the packages you are using.

I also never stuck with Fedora but to be fair, this was several years ago. With the atomic versions, it really seems like a different discussion now.

I am also always skeptical at first with low track record distros, but will still have a look!

Thank you, haven’t heard of it yet, and will look into it!

Thank you for your suggestion! Yes, NixOS seems a bit too much.

Atomic Kinoite really looks very similar to Aurora. Is there any benefit of one over another?

Sell it to me, please