Debian XFCE or Xubuntu LTS.

xfce is stubbornly slow at introducing new features, but it is absolutely rock-solid. Hell I don’t think they’ve changed their icon set in some 20 years.

Debian and *buntu LTS are also likewise slow feature updaters that focus on stability.

So, any distro to any other distro?

• Installs Fedora Silverblue
• Rebases to Bazzite

Jobs done chief!

I’m tossing in another vote for Fedora. It’s honestly about the closest you’ll get to “Standard Linux”.

It’s one of the most bleeding-edge distros while still being very stable and secure (Rolling Releases are more up-to-date but I’ve had enough issues with them). Traditionally a Gnome-First Distro but the word is that the next release will promote KDE alongside Gnome (That said KDE is already great on it).

IIRC Most major anti-cheat platforms not using kernel -level support linux these days. The SteamDeck forced their hand.

The problem is the developers. They have the ability to specifically block Linux and that’s only going to change once enough people use it. As for kernel level that’s an entirely different can of worms and I’m fine just not playing those games.

I tried openSUSE a few months back because I wanted to be more closely associated with SUSE than Red Hat (I had to update to a new RHEL release at work about a year ago and really hated some of the shit they were pulling).

Here’s a list of issues I had:

• Was forced to not encrypt my system because for some reason the unlock screen rarely recognized my keyboard was connected and I couldn’t input the password. I would have to turn on the computer, then reboot at least once to get it to work.
• The absolute confusion surrounding YaST when I tried it out. The community made it sound like the best thing about openSUSE, but also don’t use it because it’s terrible. Apparently it’s being depreciated now. Don’t want to learn an entire system just for it to be removed.
• I didn’t experience any issues with this but it makes me nervous: Rolling Release + Required (for me) Community Repos. Meanwhile the standard release is slower than Fedora
• This one is a big “first world problem” but it really annoyed me. zypper, it’s one of the longest package manager names, and i can’t tab to autocomplete because there are other packages with similar names.

Now, all of these I problems I could probably fix. But it just wasn’t really worth the effort when my main issue was: “The downstream company associated with my Distro did some dumb shit that doesn’t really impact my system.”

Rhythmbox has been my main music app for over 15 years now. Every now and then I’ll check out other options but I always end up back after a couple days.

I do wish they would give the UI some attention. Nothing major, just a few visual tweaks to bring it inline with modern Gnome (the alternative toolbar plugin is really close)