Ubuntu/Canonical gets flak for telemetry & Snap packages, despite PrivacyTools.io recommending it. Criticism stems from perceived compromises on privacy & a “walled garden” feel, despite being a better option than Windows/macOS. It’s just a clash between open-source ideals & pragmatic realities.

I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too “old” for my liking.

Nowadays, with Flatpaks, so many software providing binaries, etc. this does not matter so much. If you want, you can even use something like Distrobox to have containers for tools using whatever bleeding edge distro you want, but still have a solid stable underpinning.

Debian also has more stuff than you would expect in backports. The main sticking point is yes, you’ll be stuck in Debian 12’s KDE until 13 comes out. But that might be sufficient for you?

(You could also use Debian Testing, which is basically a rolling release. But I’d consider stable first.)

I’ve pretty much run every distro under the sun. From arch to Gentoo to Debian and all of the middle ones. I then landed on endeavour OS and used it for around 3 years. It was great until it broke.

Every couple of months something breaks and I can never fix it. Nothing fixes it, even a timeshift restore. I just had to reinstall, and that was painful. I’ve then set out on a new hunt.

I’m now experimenting with Nobara OS as it is a better Fedora and comes with some goodies for gaming. It’s been ok so far besides this occasional random freezing that I can’t figure out. It goes away by either rebooting or switching to a tty and back to GUI. I’m still experimenting with it. If it works well, I’ll keep it, if not, my next experiment will be BazziteOS. I did try mint for a little bit, too, and liked it, but I wanted to explore more.

You sound like a perfect fit for Arch.

I’d just go Tumbleweed

You summarize it quite well. But I would still recommend Arch (but as an Arch user since 2008 I am biased on this). Why?

• Lightweight, ideal for gaming. My full-featured Wayland-setup with labwc runs with ca. 2 gigabytes of RAM, including Firefox, which on it’s own currently takes up 800 megabytes. Not that RAM would be an actual issue on modern gaming setups, but still, this shows how little resources the system needs for itself.
• Gaming on Linux is pretty much solved nowadays thanks to Valve (Steam, Proton, etc.) and Flatpaks. Games that do not work are intentionally made to not work on other platforms than Windows due the games using ring0 spyware as DRM and for anti-cheat.
• Privacy by concept – while there are no specific measures taken regarding privacy, the default installation just does nothing except initializing the hardware and allowing the user to sign in. Everything else is up to you.
• Software development is – like gaming – a no-brainer. All common tools work on Linux. Even more: Dependency handling, setting up the environment, using different compilers – all this feels much smoother than on Windows.
• Maintainability is great. Since there are no package changes from upstream, you can be sure that bugs are typically bugs in the software and not coming from Arch packaging.Thanks to rolling release you get much less updates at the same time compared to fixed release distribution – ganted you update regularly. I check the news and update every 1-2 weeks at the weekend.

And since you’re coming from Windows, you have to learn new stuff anyways. So why not dive head first into Arch?

Like others have said Arch is not as intimidating as it would appear to be. Over the last couple of years, they improved IHMO the most difficult process for the average user of installing Arch. You now just run archinstall Then follow the system prompts. It’s constantly being improved. If you do go with Arch, aside from using Pacman to install apps, you can use “Yay” or “Paru” or others which pull from the vast AUR repository.

I used Arch for a few years and recently moved over to Aurora Linux (Immutable KDE distro adapted from Fedora’s CoreOS and uBlueOS which is an offshoot of CoreOS) Specifically, I use the Developer experience of Aurora which gives you a VSCode type of editor as well as Podman desktop included as well as other items. It’s meant for those who wish to develop and not have to worry about keeping the system up to date. It runs updates in the background and rebooting your system will run the updates.

The reason I left Arch was simple, I used to like to live on the edge of software as well, until it took one too many hastily released updates which borked my Arch system. My home PC has morphed from being my dedicated computer to my wife’s and my computer which is fine, but I’d like to keep it available for her avoiding the need to do a repair because an update broke it.

Keep an eye out for the KDE Linux OS which they have in development and not yet for use, but is earmarked for being the official immutable OS for KDE which will receive their bleeding edge updates. https://linuxiac.com/kde-announced-its-kde-linux-distro/ https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux

I plan on migrating to that once it’s finished. :) I’ve become a fan of immutable OS’s because they allow you to roll back if something should go wrong. Which it rarely does :)

I was about to suggest Debian and Gnome. 😂

Remember that you can always have current versions of programs by using flatpak and appimage on Debian.

I’m currently on Fedora because my hardware was not supported yet by Debian when I got it. I’ve had a lot more problems with Fedora than Debian though and intend to go back to Debian when 13 comes out and use flatpak for the applications that I really want to be at their current version.

I have similar values to yours re community and privacy.

Seems like you answered your own question. If a gaming software engineering privacy enthusiast isn’t a power user, I don’t know what is.

Also, Tumblweed really isn’t intimidating. Give it a try.

Based on your write-up, one of the Arch based distros is likely your best bet. My strong recommendation would be EndeavourOS. It is awesome.

If you use EOS, install both the current stable kernel and the LTS one. Use current day-to-day. In the very rare instance that you have a kernel or driver issue, boot into LTS.

Fedora is a great distro. As a non-American, I would say that you do not need to be so focussed on either IBM or the “American” control over Fedora.

1 - Fedora has a great community and a strong commitment to Free Software. Independence from Red Hat’s commercial agenda is the very reason it exists.

2 - Even in a worst case scenario, you are not locked into Fedora and switching is low risk and easy. There is little downside to enjoying Fedora now even if something was to happen later (however unlikely).

3 - modern Linux distros are almost all built from the exact same base elements. Fedora is really no more exposed than anything else.

4 - Red Hat is a driving force behind half the technology at the heart of whatever distro you will end up on including SystemD, Wayland, Pipewire, Glibc, GCC, and the Linux Kernel itself. To repeat point number 3, you are no less exposed to the influence of IBM/Red Hat on Ubuntu or even Arch.

I mean, you could use something like Chimera Linux that avoids SystemD, GCC, and Glibc. But you would still be using Wayland, Pipewire, and of course the kernel. And Chimera does not sound what you are looking for.

I would recommend EOS but I would not avoid Fedora for the reasons you cite.

Good job eliminating Ubuntu.

This mentality that “Corporate backed stuff is bad” should be thrown out of the window. Alot of evil corporations have contributed to make Linux better for everyone.

Regardless, have you tried Debian Stable with Backports?

Have you looked at Linux Mint or other Ubuntu derivatives that have programs compatible with Ubuntu without all the scuff Ubuntu is known to do bad

Again, are you sure affiliations with IBM and Redhat makes Fedora worse? Can you justify this statement?

It all comes down to how “techie,” you are. If you want something safe, than Debian is fine. All you have to do is not use Debian Stable and use Debian Sid. There are also many other Debian based distros that are excellent for new comers. Many are likely to recommend you Mint, which is a fine distro for people how are new to Linux.

OpenSUSE is pretty good if you are into rolling releases. Fedora is excellent if you want to be building your own apps from source and know how to use the proper flags when building. However, if you want something that is a bit faster and simpler to use, then I would suggest something else.

If you want something independent and you say that you know your way around computers then either Arch or something Arch based, so you are not going full on KISS. In the end, it all comes down to how much of a DIY system do you want and much of a system you want to just work. Do you wan it be rock solid or with a higher chance of breakage.

Personally if you want to go pure, then go Debian Sid, it is a good mix of rock solid along with some newer packages and it is way more stable --statically speaking, or sort of-- than Ach. Again, this is anecdotal as you will have a number of people say that they had been on Arch for a while without any issues. So, people’s mileage may carry.

On one of my old machines, I have been testing Q4OS and Mabox, which are Debian based and Arch based respectably and they have been border line perfect for years. Q4OS uses KDE out of the box. Mabox uses Openbox, so it might not be something you are looking for. Both are very light on resources which you can use for running all the apps you want.

However if you have copious amounts of RAM and you want something a little more known, then check out Mint, or NixOS. The latter requires a bit of a learning curve but if you already work with computers, and have no issue reading documentation then you won’t find it difficult.

Doesn’t seem like anyone mentioned it yet, so I’m gonna chime in: Bluefin-DX by Universalblue might be worth a look.

It’s a special developer version of their already interesting and rock solid atomic distro, meaning it’s not rly meant that you do much with the OS part of the filesystem (I’d recommend you read up on it, since I xan’t explain it that well) It has VSCode preinstalled (you can replace it with VSCodium tho with a simple command IIRC) and allows you to doing up virtually endless Linux environments where you install your additional programmes that aren’t available as a Flatpak (you can still use them in the CLI, DW)

I am a software developer and used to working with wsl, debian servers, etc. I selfhost a bunch of things and know my way around the linux commandline and would call me privacy enthusiast that uses a lot of FLOSS software. I also do occasional gaming but I guess that should work on any distro with enough work.

You’re a power user who has enough technical knowledge to deal with the issues of running bleeding edge.

I’d say Arch, even the manual install isn’t too complicated once you’ve done it a few times and then you’ll have access to the latest and greatest packages.

Occasionally this results in some weird bugs. For example, currently, when waking from suspend my HDMI outputs fail to connect until I change the display properties, so I wrote a bash script to toggle the refresh rate and bound that to a hotkey so I can recover without a display. I’m sure in a day or two a system update will fix it and, if not, I know how to locate the problem (in the system log: kernel: nvidia-modeset: WARNING: GPU:0: HDMI FRL link training failed. ) and report it on the appropriate bug tracker.

If this doesn’t sound intimidating then you’ll be fine as an Arch user.