u/NelsonMinar

When you set up a new Linux distro, how do you bring over your personal configuration? The apps you need, the screen layout and look, etc?

It the old Unix days it was easy: you copy over a few dot files and you're set. I've got Chez Moi set up doing that fine. But the problem I've run into is a lot of modern Linux desktop apps are unruly and create lots of files, some of which can't be successfully copied over. It's not like you can just bring all of ~/.config over and call it a day. I'm particularly having trouble with KDE Plasma apps that way.

The other thing I've run into trying out distros is that everything's just a little different. Like the way you install Chrome or 1Password or even Steam is different from stock Fedora to Bazzite to Nobara. I feel like with every new distro I end up having to spend several hours getting it set up the way I like.

I've just had the most lovely experience trying out Bazzite as a desktop Linux, after years of Windows. I love that Bazzite works out of the box without much tinkering and allows me to play games and run LLMs. What I don't like is the atomic Fedora distribution. I'd prefer to be able to install software like 1Password or various shell tools directly in the OS. I suspect what I really like is KDE Plasma, that's new to me.

Is there some distro I can use with KDE Plasma and a fighting chance to get gaming working reasonably well, but that is not an immutable distro? I almost always use Debian or Ubuntu on servers, sometimes under Proxmox. I've tinkered with Arch before but have never seen the point in doing that much work. NixOS is not for me.

Some AI suggested looking at Nobara, Kubuntu 26.04, Tuxedo OS, or CachyOS. Of those Kubuntu appeals to me the most just because it's the most mainstream.

(My hardware is an ordinary AMD desktop system with an NVidia 5060 and a very nice 6K HDR display. Most of the day I'm running web browsers or games from Steam. But I also do software development in Linux and am playing with local LLMs. It really impressed me that Bazzite could drive my monitor correctly and run Steam games and LM Studio with no effort on my part. I'm willing to do more work to install well supported Ubuntu packages for Nvidia drivers, etc as long as they work without a lot of tinkering.)