cecilkorik

PikaOS is Debian based, and they’ve built the deps they need for Steam in 32-bit, so it’s not the end of the world AFAIK. GloriousEggroll seems to be part of it too, so if any refugees are looking for something not Fedora-based there you go. Although his efforts for now seem focused more on Nobara (which is Fedora-based) maybe this will cause some shake-ups there too. I can see Pika is already picking up speed from this though, the Discord is super active.

Even if Fedora doesn’t ever drop support I think even considering the possibility is shaking people’s confidence in using it as a base going forward, sort of like how Unity’s quickly-walked-back disasters drove people irrevocably towards Godot and other engines. Arch and Arch-based distros are probably starting to look much more appealing too.

I absolutely love that you describe PikaOS as porno filthy. No judgement, no defense, no argument, I just think it’s a hilarious description while perfectly making your point, and is pretty much the best thing I’ve read today. Thank you!

And just to stay on-topic, yeah I’ve found flatpak invaluable in working around some of debian’s unfortunate packaging limitations. I try to use the debian packages first if possible, but if the version is too old, not available, or has crappy dependency conflicts, flatpak to the rescue!

For what it’s worth, Nobara’s another good option and being Fedora-based might be more familiar if you’re coming from Bazzite. I think the developers of PikaOS and Nobara are the same, or at least I think the projects share some history and some effort. Either way both are great distros depending on which flavor of package management you prefer. I’m definitely “an apt person” so Pika birb OS is the one for me, also it’s got a pretty cute art theme.

I think it’s a great OS and it’s absolutely amazing how far Linux Gaming has come even in the last few years. Personally, I have to say I’m not a huge fan of Bazzite’s immutability-based design. I know there are pros and cons, and they just don’t balance for me. I’m a tinkerer, I like to play with the OS internals and have full control of them. Sometimes that causes problems, but it also causes learning, and I like to learn how the OS works and what it’s doing “under the hood” and in my mind Linux is great for that and that’s part of the appeal. For a lot of people, an immutable OS is probably the right way to go, it’s much safer, and stabler, and I know most people don’t care. But I do think it’s worth considering that Linux is not one-size-fits-all and while Bazzite might be best for some people it’s not best for everyone.

As soon as you start getting into more customization, if you find annoyances you want to fix, sometimes it’s much easier when you’re on a traditional, non-immutable distro, and I consider it an important bonus that this will help you learn. You do have to be more careful, and more respectful about running shell commands freely that might destroy your system, but I think that’s good experience to have.

Personally I run PikaOS (debian-based) with KDE Plasma 6 and it’s been an absolute pleasure. I have found some of the above mentioned annoyances, but I’ve fixed them to my satisfaction and I’m extremely happy with the result. I have yet to find any game that is difficult to get running, I have yet to find anything that is difficult at all really. It’s been straightforward and rock solid stable. I give a lot of credit to not just the distros but also to projects like KDE, Wine, Proton, Lutris, etc. which are building this incredible gaming ecosystem on Linux. It couldn’t be a better time to dump Windows, and soon we’ll be at the point where no one will mourn it.