I don't understand why we need "gaming versions" for distros. I've never used them but if there's stuff that's broken for gaming in the base distros, shouldn't that just be fixed?
There is unlikely to be a time that "things stop moving" enough to make all these trade-offs go away, but you can pretty much just add all this stuff to the base distro yourself anyway if you want to (I still play games on vanilla Silverblue, for example).
For this group, needing to follow wiki guides and such and spending time on basic system functionality just isn’t happening. If that’s the only option, they’re just going to reinstall Windows.
I think the group you're thinking about are console gamers, who never had to upgrade drivers, never dealt with mods and generally has a very different experience compared to PC gaming.
I’m increasingly leaning that direction. Day job is software dev, have been using and/or tinkering with some form of *nix for almost 25 years, and have been using computers for even longer and sometimes I just don’t have the patience for fiddling around with computers to coax them into doing what I want them to.
You shouldn't have to do that even on Linux. It's a big thing that holds Linux back.
Sure this could probably be a package in a more "traditional distro", but I'm almost sure most people don't expect their Display Manager to be replaced with Steam when they install a package.
You can add steam big picture mode as a session type which would let you pick it from the login manager (the same as if you had both GNOME & KDE installed, for example). There would be no need to replace anything.
I hope some of these work out. Honestly from a strict compatibility and ease of use standpoint nothing has been as simple or reliable for me as Ubuntu used to be. I left it due to snaps and premium nagging, but I've had the usual little "linux" quirks ever since. As much as I love cachy, my current quirk with it is that heavy disk writes tank the system aggressively. A bit of brief research suggests this might be due to using BTRFS, but I'm comfortable enough with the system that I don't want to do a total reformat right now.
I guess what I'm saying is that as much as I love linux there is still some refinement needed.
> PikaOS Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian's cutting-edge "Unstable" branch [...] [1]
Trademark and reach.
Gaming distributions don't run a stable version of Linux distributions. They're always a spin-off from one of the popular Linux distributions (rebasing every once in a while), with additional changes tailored towards gaming.
Now, you cannot just say I call my distribution Debian GNU/Linux Gaming Edition. If you would, you'd need to work under the umbrella of Debian. With a different name, you differentiate from Debian, while you can keep the advantages of their framework (hello Ubuntu).
* Manjaro is Arch.
* Cachy is a patched Arch (exactly what Arch avoids, heavy patching).
* SteamOS is Arch.
* Arch is Arch.
It doesn't take a lot of work to get any distro to become a good gaming machine, but it does take some work to make it a seamless turnkey gaming machine for the masses.
Seems like you're blinded by your own context, if CachyOS for example see patches, integrate them earlier than upstream, and let user use them today rather than "long term", how is that not useful or beneficial to the users who want/needs that?
Besides, testing patches this way sounds like it'll have wider impact in the community than just the distro that integrated the patch, as it'll have a way wider testing userbase then. Isn't that also good long term?
Which is very pointless if it's three years late for e.g. a game release
Also very few people want to tinker with every single little thing, they want a nice stable base that does what you expect and build upon it - that's why most people were fine with previous versions of windows. So if cachy fixes 95% of the issues for you, why not go for it? Saving time and headache is a reasonable thing for a focused distro.