You don't need to test every distro.

Honestly you could capture 90 percent of the market with just arch and Debian/Ubuntu.

You could add 2 or 3 of the gaming focused distros for comparison however since they tend to be built on top of the two above things are more likely going to vary based on configuration more than which distro or de you are using.

I use Bazzite for my HTPC (AMD NUC).

For a "set it and forget it" gaming console experience? It is awesome. It feels like I already have a GabeCube under my TV (that I bought for probably half the price...). And when I have to do more complicated things than "run the update once a month", I just ssh in from either my desktop or laptop.

But... it is an immutable/atomic distro. So if the packages you want to add are flatpaks or appimages? You are probably fine. Otherwise? You get into a mess where you are adding packages to your layers (?) and kinda feel like you are playing with fire. I did that to get iperf3 installed to test some networking upgrades and it was mostly painless but it was also a really bad experience versus sudo dnf install iperf3. And... even on machines where I spend 90% of my time ssh'ing into servers, I still tend to want to install a good amount of local packages as a developer.

So my suggestion would be to stick to Bazzite for gaming first platforms and continue to use whatever distro you like (Fedora for the win!) for "real" computers.

Also, if you aren't as annoyed by atomic distros as I am, I would still be wary of Bazzite. They have a lot of different SKUs and I don't care enough to try to parse what each one does. But the common use case is to basically treat a machine like a Steam Deck... which means you boot into Big Picture with essentially no login screens or a REALLY insecure pin code. And then you switch to desktop mode with a single click.

There are ways to harden that (and very much an argument of whether you need to harden a machine in your home). And Linux, generally, has very good protections by actually requiring auth for sudo. But I already feel sketchy that I am logged into Steam/GoG on a box with almost no protections. But I also live in an environment where I don't have to worry about someone buying 10k in fortnite bucks on my TV.

Dev work in the uBlue family (and yes I use bazzite for dev) leans heavily on distrobox (think development containers). Took a bit to adapt but now I think it's the ducks nuts. Because you decouple the dev environment from the main, immutable OS you get a lot of wins, especially if you work with a lot of different projects as you can setup distroboxes specifically for each. AI code that only works with specific drivers / libraries / python with instructions only for Ubuntu or Arch, no worries, make up a distrobox, when you're finished archive it and spin it up later if needed. If you're only working one project on say LTS or something it's going to be much less of a win, but for the flexible developer it's a godsend.

As to doom emacs or whatever, I have a post install script for distroboxes that sets up my preferred environment for the big 3 (Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu), it's not hard. Very much a kill your darlings philosophy.

ETA Because of this workflow it really doesn't matter what the host OS is, so it may as well be something I can game on, and I'm fond of the Fedora relative stability with sharp, but not bleeding edge.

as i understand it, bazzite is very gaming-oriented.

See also:

• Bazzite DX
• Bluefin DX
• Aurora DX

bazzite is an excellent all-round linux distro for contemporary spec computer (gpu, >=16GB ram)

i use it for rust and c# dev work using distrobox. all gui ide's and tooling run in the containers with excellent performance

i also layer a handful of packages on the "immutable" or atomic base os for some carefully chosen tools i want. the base os is generally well fitted out

very highly recommend as daily dev driver and also gaming

Bluefin and Auroa are for you, changed how I program and organise, our you can make your own template and just pop everything you're missing in the containerfile similar to how nix pkgs works

Bazzite is part of the Universal Blue project, which is basically three distros based on Fedora Silverblue.

Bazzite - gaming focus Aurora - KDE desktop Bluefin - Gnome desktop

Look up the universal blue site and you’ll see more about them.

distroboxes are incredible and distrobox expose is legitimately the coolest thing I've seen in ages. I have protonge and proton tricks which every game uses installed in a distrobox, and via distrobox expose my host can use them without any any other setup. it's awesome.

same thing goes for any of my dev tools. i was just shocked about the ability to expose commands and have it be seamless enough for games.

https://docs.bazzite.gg/Dev/

If IDEs from Flathub and CLI tools from Homebrew serve your needs, no further action is required. If deeper system integration is needed for VSCode (ie. devcontainers), Docker (ie. Podman is not sufficient), etc - then see below specialized images.

There is a whole Bazzite for Devs page that mentions Bazzite-DX for development to handle some things like devcontainers: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite-dx

Their main website also says:

Running a game, a development environment, a container for your Jellyfin server, or a utility only available on the Arch User Repository? You can rest assured it works here. Bazzite is developed on Bazzite.

At the end of the day, its an immutable fedora distro. Which may serve your needs. or may not. And bazzite's primary focus is on gaming. It will most likely work (given a few criteria), but it may not given that is not their primary focus.

when it comes to the decade of Year Of The Linux Desktop

🤣🤣🤣

that's how I started 15 years ago… put it on a netbook just to try it and loved it… showed the wife and she said "it's coooler than windows" (loved her more from that day)… windows never entered my house since

The way I solve anti-cheat is by never playing games that require it.

If the anti-cheat is client-side, that's a solved problem, thanks to avoidance.

Not very difficult to find, it is supported https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Waydroid_Setup_Guide/