Hej lemmings! (Hoping this is relevant enough for the selfhosted commjnity)
Quick question for you all: do you stick with the same distro across your PC, laptop, and server, or do you pick different ones based on the device and what you’re doing?
For me, I’ve been mixing and matching depending on the use case, but I’m starting to think it’d be nice to just have one distro (or at least one family like Fedora or Debian) running everywhere. That way I wouldn’t get confused about default settings or constantly have to look up flags for different package managers.
Right now my setup is:
- Gaming rig: CachyOS
- Laptop: AuroraOS
- NAS: Unraid
- Various project servers: DietPi, Debian, Alpine etc…
I feel like NixOS might be the only distro that could realistically handle all these use cases, but I’m a bit scared of the learning curve and the maintenance work it’d take to migrate everything over.
Am I the only one who feels like having “one distro to rule them all” would be nice? How do you guys handle your setups? All ears! 😊
That’s the same philosophy I’ve applied for a long time. Recently, I found out that gaming is an exception to the rule, though. While older versions are just fine for the most part, there are edge cases where that no longer applies. I also found out that I care about one of them. Until you hit that brick wall, there’s no reason to switch. Just keep on using Debian for everything.
Took me a while to realise that I was spending way too much time figuring out workarounds instead of actually gaming. I ended up using Bazzite in my gaming rig because it works so well for that purpose.
I’ve yet to run into major issues with gaming. But I’m curious what issue you ran into that caused the switch to Bazzite? I actually tried Bazzite briefly on my latest laptop acquisition (HP Spectre x360) before going with LMDE 7; I didn’t like the immutable aspect. I’m a tinkerer at heart and can’t handle not being able to get under the hood, so to speak.
It was Space Engineers 2. Even made a post about the journey.
All the other games were just fine though. If you don’t stumble upon one of these edge cases, there’s no reason to switch.
Hmmm.
Under LMDE7, the HP Spectre does great with the games I’ve thrown at it so far (BeamNG.Drive, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Universe Simulator, Minecraft, etc), but despite exceeding the minimum specs, it really struggled with running anything in RPCS3. Stuttering, frame drops, graphics simply not loading, etc… I ended up writing off RPCS3 in general as “too heavy for a laptop” and tasked my desktop gaming PC as the dedicated PS3 emulator - works great.
Sounds like I might have to give Bazzite a shot again on the HP. I use that laptop for a lot of things, including diagnostics software for my cars, but I also have a perfectly-capable AMD Thinkpad T14 G1 hanging around that needs a purpose, too.
What was the actual issue you ran into though? I didn’t see it in your post. I believe you, but my curiosity is piqued.