153
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
153 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
2611 readers
5 users here now
Tech related news and discussion. Link to anything, it doesn't need to be a news article.
Let's keep the politics and business side of things to a minimum.
Rules
No memes
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Honestly, the arguing about distros is a big reason I don't move to Linux. I want something well supported and going to stick around, but all I ever hear are new names come up every 5 minutes and I can't help but assume contributors are just dropping off left and right for other distros.
Steam being an actual company behind a distro gives at least an impression of support stability because they have a economical incentive to kind of keep it going.
Is any of this actually true? No, and I know in my heart of the cards it isn't, but choice paralysis is getting real, and 30k distros to choose from don't help.
Canonical (Kubuntu) and Red Hat (Fedora, I suggest the KDE variant) are very big and old companies if that's what you want.
I run both of those (Kubuntu on the desktop, Fedora KDE in a laptop) and either one is a good option.
If you pick one of the core distros like (Fedora/Centos/RHEL/SuSE) or (Debian/Ubuntu) they have been around for decades and will be around for decades more. You don't have to pay attention to whatever trendy new Linux distro of the week has just come up.
Yeah I was the same way. When you express that there’s too many options, and you don’t feel confident in selecting between them, a Linux enthusiast will always answer with a couple of options as if it is the final answer. Then someone always responds to that comment saying why the options are wrong and suggests others. Then someone else comments saying “Just use one of the ones that…” and doesn’t even stick to a specific distro but rather assumes you have the background knowledge to interpret and move forward based on a few key features.
Eventually I just went with Mint and it went pretty well. Maybe I’ll switch, but the first try is the hardest and now I’m over that hurdle. Took years longer than it should have to start because people can’t help but argue in every comment chain.
It’s definitely more attractive to use SteamOS because we know it’s an OS being designed for our general use case by a company that will support it meaningfully (as it already has been with Proton), and will continue to support it for a while. I’m sure a lot of users will switch OSes after a while, and existing Linux users should support the “first step” move to SteamOS knowing this.
It’s probably not the best possible OS choice, but considering no one can agree that any option is the best choice, that doesn’t really factor into the decision.