Requirements:
- Must be more user friendly than LFS
- Must not be in the RHEL/IBM family/stream or derivative
- Must not be SLES or derivative
- Does not make you install a desktop environment
- Must have steam
Hopes
- Rolling release
- Has a package manager of some sort
- Doesn’t require manual intervention every six months
- Maintainers aren’t psycho
As someone else has said: NixOS. You said in a comment that you use Arch because of the AUR. Good news, nixpkgs is larger and fresher than the AUR, without needing to tap into any kind of third-party/unofficial repo.
The unstable branch is essentially a rolling release (and very stable despite its name). I am happily gaming on it with Steam. During installation, you can just choose to not install a desktop. (However, due to how nix works, it’s trivial to rip out the entire DE at any point, should you so choose.)
But it is a learning curve for sure. Steep, but not very long.
Hey as long as the learning curve isn’t build your own OS, that’s fine. I did hear the NixOS maintainers were a bit problematic. Heard anything?
Yeah… I heard that too, about half a year after I got really into nix.
To be honest, I try to keep away from community drama as much as possible, so I am not entirely up to date here. I think (and I might be wrong, if someone reading this knows better, correct me!) there’s three main points of contention:
- Queer, PoC, and other “minority” users experienced harassment on (semi-)official channels (Github, Discord, Forums): That fucking sucks. I’m queer myself and lucky enough to not have experienced any of that in my time with Nix, but if I had not decided on Nix yet and learned about this before getting invested, it might have given me enough pause to not put any time into this. In all honesty however, that’s sadly a problem with many, many OSS projects.
- Governance and Funding: I do not know much about the governance, afaik there was a bit of drama about the inventor of Nix acting like a (benevolent?) dictator for life, but those issues should have been resolved with a new governance model. The really big, inciting incident of a lot of community drama with Nix through was a bit over a year ago, when the committee in question decided to let Anduril fund a NixCon, against the explicit and loud protests of the community. That sucked. Hard. While obviously all kind of shit companies use all sorts of great OSS projects, inviting Anduril to sponsor your official conference is… not really understandable.
- Conflicts of Interest: the aforementioned inventor of Nix owns a company heavily invested in the nix ecosystem. A bit reminiscent of the way that, say, Google holds Chromium by the balls, though to a much less severe extent. Miraculously, features that are “extremely unstable” in nix (but wanted by the community for a long time) suddenly get released in closed source to enterprise customers… However, the open source project is separate from, and not beholden to the whims of, said company.
My position on all three points is this: They are not great; but a) they do not threaten the ecosystem, which is mature and independent of this drama, and not reliant on one or a couple of central, potentially problematic, people; and b) there are community projects that actively and effectively do distance themselves from all of these points (namely: Lix) and which are drop-in replacements for the core nix language and compiler, meaning if the upstream project actively did something to really piss you of, you could move with very little work to something independent of Nix.
I hope this will not become necessary, because Nix is genuinely magic. Once you get the hang of it, nothing on your computer is particularly difficult anymore. You also get the best-in-class package management (and it’s easy! Once you have configured your own system to your liking, you already know everything you need to package your own software and contribute to nixpkgs!), being “bleeding edge” yet at the same time incredibly stable (seriously, I have switched all of my servers and VMs to Nix and I have not had one single incident once, including after updating machines after forgetting about them for 1.5+ years).
Anyways. Sorry for the wall of text lol.
Yeah, please don’t apologize for useful information. This was very helpful and I very much appreciate your insight. It’s good to know that there are alternatives should things go south.
No problem. If you do decide to give NixOS a try, feel free to ask about anything should things be unclear :)
The Rolling preference mostly conflicts with the ‘doesn’t require intervention’ preference. You can mitigate it somewhat by using a snapshot system like timeshift or snapper, but rolling distros by their nature are more likely to have potential problems.
Alternatively, immutable distros are kinda like a more (potentially) reliable rolling distro with built-in snapshots. Since you don’t want redhat or openSUSE based distros, that pretty much leaves perhaps Vanilla OS, but I’m not aware if they offer a headless install option.
Overall, I personally think Debian 13 checks the most boxes. It let’s you choose no DE during install, is rock solid, easily installs steam (after you enable the 32bit repos), and can be upgraded to newer major releases easily and reliably.
The only downside is it isn’t rolling, but with flatpaks and appimages for newer versions of software, the potentially older repo packages aren’t really much of an issue nowadays.
This is an unusual combination of requirements:
- Does not make you install a desktop environment
- Must have steam
I guess maybe you’re planning to use the same distro for a server and a gaming system? Debian can do that. I recommend enabling Debian Backports on the gaming system, for access to recent kernel/firmware/mesa packages (you pick which ones you need).
By the way, markdown ate your list formatting because you didn’t put a space between the - and the text.
Thanks, fixed formatting.
I just run i3wm. It’s easier to do get to where I’m going if it never installs gnome to begin with.
Opensuse tumbleweed, lets you select or unselect any DE you want. Right before confirming install summary with Next you click the software link and are brought to the package patterns , and then can go to details and uncheck everything and just click packages you want for the system.
Sorry don’t do SUSE
Tumbleweed is a community distro before SUSE in the chain, new innovations that are proved out go from TW to SUSE, then Leap is derived from SUSE with shared binaries. Unless there are other issues you don’t like besides SUSE/leap corporate?
NixOS is pretty nice imo.
It’s pretty stable, has a good package manager, and is quite declarative thanks to the Nix language based config. It also supports Steam and has a dedicated “Games” page in the wiki (https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Games).
Downside is it’s unlike pretty much every other distro, and could have a steep learning curve.
Been using it about a year without problems, would recommend.
Debian. Set it to stable instead of trixie and it’s kind of a rolling release. Testing if you want newer versions. You won’t get breakage unless you use sid.
Does that have issues? Part of the reason I’m looking for a rolling release is way back in the late 2000’s, you could upgrade Ubuntu but things always broke and so you might as well reinstall
I’ve not had issues doing distro upgrades in a long time, and I mess with my systems a lot. There’s been a lot of progress in 15+ years, and Debian is usually pretty good about keeping stuff working.
CachyOS or plain Arch
@hddsx Arch linux bro
That’s what I’m on right now
Then it would be important to know why that doesn’t work for you.
I’m only on Arch because of the AUR. I don’t have to manually intervene every six months like I used to, but there’s still manual intervention i dislike. With the AUR being attacked, while still usable, it kind of takes away from why I’m using arch over, say, gentoo. Might as well see what else is out there
If you dislike manual interventions, Gentoo is probably not what you want. I mean, my experience is a bit dated, since I stopped using Gentoo in 2009, but oh boy, those half system rebuilds because an important library update, not fun. Maybe OpenSuse Tumbleweed is something you want to look into? Unless you consider it RHEL because it uses RPM packages.
