I’ve been running bazzite as my primary OS and while its pretty great for gaming but just about every other software is a bit of a pain to figure out. I recently heard about Drauger OS which is based on Ubuntu which I’m way better with. Does anyone have experience with Drauger? I’d like to hear about is before I do the full hop.
PikaOS is gaming Debian, and Debian is just pre-Ubuntu-Ubuntu without the Ubuntu-shittiness that Ubuntu adds.
If you like apt and dpkg and deb package management, that’s all Debian’s work, not Ubuntu, and I don’t see why you wouldn’t be just as happy with Debian. If you like snap… well, then, there’s something wrong with you and I don’t know how to help you. :P
Debian is the base for a huge number of distributions (including Ubuntu itself) for good reason. PikaOS is built on that good foundation. I’m running PikaOS with KDE on basically all my (modern-ish) machines, and I would happily recommend it to anybody.
I have no strong feelings about snap, like flat pack I find it to be a coin toss as to whether it works fine on the first try or has never worked and never will. Does straight Debian have a desktop environment and consistent guides? The biggest thing that keeps me close to ubuntu is that I can always search “[whatever I’m trying to do] Ubuntu” and find a dozen guides explaining exactly what i need to make it happen and they’re rarely out of date or wrong.
I’m pretty sure Debian’s default desktop environment out of the box is Gnome, but like any decent distro you can usually either get it preinstalled with different environments, choose it during installation (I think it’s part of tasksel on Debian) or changing the desktop environment should not be much harder than installing the appropriate package or metapackage, typically on Debian this is something like
task-kde-desktopbut there are more details for KDE specifically here. PikaOS likewise has a KDE installer image.I think guides are even better on Debian personally but YMMV. I understand the attraction of having a good ecosystem for stuff like that, and Debian is itself very popular, maybe not quite Ubuntu level, but being the upstream for almost every apt/deb based distro means that there is usually pretty good compatibility between guides for different flavors and often the Debian one is where things get started and you can often use Debian guides directly on Ubuntu or PikaOS with no issues and no modifications needed. Occasionally you might need to tweak some package names or paths slightly,
apt-cache search <name>ordpkg -l <package>can often help a lot with any inconsistencies you might encounter.The reverse is often also possible: I know I have probably used Ubuntu guides directly on Debian in the past, although I can’t remember the last time I actually did that, because the Debian-specific guide is usually what the Ubuntu ones are actually based on and I can’t remember finding a Ubuntu guide where I couldn’t also find something corresponding for Debian. Sometimes I do kind of look at them both and try to understand if they’re doing certain things differently for some particular reason and that helps me understand if there might be version or library issues that might be something to keep an eye on.