I'm planning to move from Windows to Linux within the next week or two and want to try several distributions, including CachyOS, Linux Mint, Fedora, Nobara, and possibly Bazzite or NixOS. I'm comfortable with technical troubleshooting and have some Linux experience from running an Ubuntu VPS, so I'm mainly looking for practical issues and differences that might not be obvious at first.
My system has a Radeon RX 7900 XT, Ryzen 9 7950X, 32GB of DDR5 memory, two M.2 NVMe drives, and one hard drive. My main uses will be gaming, Blender, Unity, web browsing, YouTube, and general desktop work.
I don't intend to dual-boot unless Linux can't handle something essential. How should I approach testing these distributions, and what should I compare beyond the default desktop environment? I'm also unsure how to organize and format my drives. My games are currently on the same drive as Windows, so I expect to reinstall them, but I have other drives containing files and would like to know whether I should back them up and wipe or reformat them. I've heard mixed opinions about using BTRFS for the home filesystem or secondary drives.
For anyone familiar with these distributions, what problems or limitations should I watch for with gaming, AMD graphics, Blender, Unity, updates, or everyday use? Are there other distributions worth considering?
2 Answers
CachyOS is worth testing if you want an Arch-based system with performance-oriented kernels and good AMD support. The trade-off with Arch-based distributions is that some proprietary or commercial applications may not provide official packages or testing for Arch, so installation can require more manual work. That doesn’t automatically mean the software won’t run, but troubleshooting can be less straightforward than on distributions with stronger vendor support.
When comparing systems, test the things you actually use: GPU drivers and Vulkan, Steam and your preferred games, controller and audio support, Blender rendering, Unity projects, sleep and display behavior, updates, and whether your preferred applications are easy to install and maintain. Also check how comfortable you are with each distribution’s update and recovery process rather than judging only by initial setup.
Back up anything important before changing partitions or filesystems. Linux can sometimes use games installed on Windows-formatted NTFS partitions, but Steam libraries on NTFS tend to cause permission, compatibility, and reliability problems. A clean Linux filesystem and a fresh game installation is usually much less troublesome.
You don’t necessarily need to wipe every drive. The drives containing data you want to keep can remain as they are if Linux can access their files, but make a separate backup before repartitioning or reformatting anything. Only erase a drive after confirming that its contents are safely backed up and that you actually want to dedicate it to Linux storage.
So the main concern is the drive containing the games, rather than every secondary drive? I’ll make backups first and only reformat drives that I plan to use for Linux libraries.
By limited app support, do you mean applications are unavailable, or mostly that getting them working can take extra effort? I’m fine with learning, but I’d prefer to know where the maintenance burden is likely to be.