Hey everyone! I’m finally fed up with Win11 and the bullshit that comes with it for the PC it’s on.

It’s being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich, and gaming PC for the living room.

I’m currently in the process of backing up all my important info and am doing research on which distro to use.

I don’t mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key. I don’t want to have to go in and update it every week… I want this one to work with minimal maintenance on my part.

I’d likely update it a few times a year, knowing me.

A few hardware specs:

MSI mobo (I’ve learned that UEFI can be a pain), 10600k, 2070 gpu, and will have a pool of 3x8tb drives that I would like to have in raid5 (or something similar) for storage (movies, TV shows, and Immich libraries), the OS will have its own drive, and I have a separate SSD that I have been using to store programs, games, yml’s for docker, and other such things that get accessed more frequently, but aren’t crucial if lost.

I’ve kinda narrowed it down to either Bazzite or CachyOS.

I’ve heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down, which I’m not a fan of, but CachyOS has features I will likely never touch (schedulers, kernels, etc…).

I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS. I’m moving away from windows for that reason. Win11 has been a nightmare for me with constant reboots and things not loading up until after I log in. Not to mention driver conflicts and all the other BS that’s come with it.

So… What say the hive mind? Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work? Or do I have it all wrong with my perception of both?

Thanks!

Ps: this will be my first full commit to Linux. I’ve dabbled in the past and am no stranger to CLI… So this will likely be a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux. Go easy on me lol

  • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Given your requirements, absolutely I’d also recommend against Bazzite and CachyOS, at least today.

    Debian stable. Enable security updates by unattended-upgrades and you can basically go over a year without manually updating (aside from the occasional reboot to activate the newer kernel).

    Then if you’re not already into containers, I propose learning about rootless Podman and using that to run your arr stack services. For example using docker-compose and/or systemd services.

    If you don’t mind going a little bit more of the beaten track, then I also encourage you to check out Alpine Linux. Their wiki explains how to install it with a read-only root filesystem which it sounds like you’d like. But since it’s early and a commitment, maybe save this adventure for later.

    Arch has a like 10x more update churn than Debian or sth and is not stable in the same sense.

    For a more hands-on system, or something offline, Arch is still great.