I used Void Linux for a long time. I put it on my laptop more than 10 years ago and it worked fine. If I ever had a complaint for it, it’s that there is no straightforward way to get a mainstream DE like GNOME or KDE running. You have to set the graphical environment manually. I was using i3 so it wasn’t a problem for me but it makes Void (like Arch) a difficult choice for new users.

After Nvidia support became stable for Wayland, I wanted to switch to a Wayland based environment. But I was not in the mood to set up a desktop from scratch. I looked around and thought I might give CachyOS a try. I liked its installed. It sets up zfs on root automatically and has an option to preconfigured KDE. It worked alright for the most part but I bounced off it eventually for two reasons. One, the pace of updates is just silly. I know that Arch and its derivatives are bleeding edge but having to download a gigabyte of packages after four days of not updating is not something that seems like good practice to me. Once an update broke SDDM but that kind of stuff can just be bad luck. Two, some software just doesn’t work. scanmem and Darktable didn’t work because of segfault and out of bounds memory access respectively. That’s not very rainbow rhythm so I moved on.

Right now I am using Fedora on my laptop and it has been fairly pleasant. I am using Niri with dank material shell and have been liking the experience so far except for inconsistent theming of GTK 3 and 4 and Qt 5 and 6. I was annoyed at first but I am not using graphical applications much these days. All the software works, updates are not as rapid. I also was not able to set up zfs on root because I was not able to find an image with zfs kernel modules included and I wasn’t able to compile the DKMS module in the live image. So I am using the standard btrfs with LUKS encryption setup. It feels good to use a filesystem with first class linux support.

All this while I had been trying out several distros on my Steam Deck as well. I tried cachyos and bazzite but didn’t see much value in using them and came back to SteamOS eventually. My main motivation for trying out third party distros was that I want to be bound by SteamOS’ immutability. But the loss of stability is not worth it because debugging problems in a handheld console without keyboard and mouse is an awful experience. For example, one day in CachyOS the power button stopped working in game mode until an update fixed the problem. SteamOS updates slowly which is perfect for not breaking stuff. The problem I had with SteamOS’ immutability was that it makes it hard to install software. But I have resorted to installing stuff using appimages and statically compiled binaries and it has been great. I am enjoying the stability.