I'm planning to move from Windows to Linux soon 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 Ubuntu server experience, but I'd prefer a traditional, non-immutable system.
My hardware is a Radeon 7900 XT, Ryzen 7950X, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, two M.2 NVMe drives, and one HDD. My main activities will be gaming, Blender, Unity, web browsing, YouTube, and general desktop use.
I don't intend to dual-boot unless Linux cannot handle something important. What should I test when comparing distributions? I'm also unsure how to handle my drives. My games are currently on the same drive as Windows, and I understand I may need to reinstall them, but should I back up and reformat the other drives as well? Is BTRFS a good choice for the home filesystem or secondary storage, and are there any filesystem compatibility concerns?
For anyone familiar with these distributions, what problems or limitations might not become obvious during an initial test? Are there other distributions worth considering?
2 Answers
For the drive containing your operating system and games, the least troublesome approach is to back up anything important and install the games again on a Linux-native filesystem. Linux can access games stored on Windows filesystems, but using them that way—especially with Steam libraries—can lead to permissions, case-sensitivity, compatibility, and performance problems. You don’t necessarily need to wipe every drive: preserve any data-only drive you need, but make a verified backup before changing partitions or filesystems.
CachyOS is a reasonable Arch-based option for that AMD hardware, and its tuned kernels and current packages may appeal to someone who enjoys experimenting. The trade-off is that Arch-based systems can occasionally require more hands-on maintenance, and some software vendors test primarily against Ubuntu, Fedora, or other mainstream distributions. That usually means extra setup or troubleshooting rather than the software being completely impossible to run. When comparing systems, test GPU drivers, Steam and Proton games, Blender rendering, Unity editor projects, controller and audio support, suspend/wake, updates, backups, and the availability of the applications you use every day.
By limited application support, do you mean applications need additional setup on Arch-based systems, rather than simply being unavailable?
So the recommendation mainly applies to the drive used for the Linux installation and game library, while other drives can remain intact if they only contain backed-up or shared data?