If you haven't looked at Garuda yet, it's the system I switched to after Bazzite. It's Arch based and user friendly.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Steam Deck
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Fedora Kinoite
I agree, really anything with KDE Plasma will feel basically the same because the Steam Deck's desktop is basically stock kde.
really anything with KDE Plasma
Op might like the stability broihght by immutability
Fedora, specifically KDE version. It will feel like the steamdeck desktop (because it is) will get quick updates and is painless to manage.
The first bug I have seen in two years is the screen lock bug just recently. But I imagine it will get sorted soon and isn't a showstopper.
Adobe and Linux isn't a thing unfortunately
Except substance painter and designer, weirdly enough
And not via adobes suite, but via steam
It's the only way to get an official Linux version of those tools
Are these tools being bought buy Adobe more recently ? That could be an explaination why, but that's good to know thanks for sharing.
A couple years ago from allegorithmic. But a Linux version was never around
Wine/Proton's magic
Nope. Native Linux. And wine/proton didn't work very well before
Oh woaw that is... interesting
I used to work with a guy who would wear what liked like a band touring tee shirt, but the "band" was "Grants March to the Sea" and the locations were every town he razed to the ground.
Since desktop mode is basically just KDE but without the ability to install software packages you could try Fedora.
They do a version just like desktop mode that has you install everything through the store, or you can get the regular variety to get a bit more flexibility.
Personally I'd steer clear of anything special as your first Linux install. Go with standard Fedora, then you can experiment and branch out if you're interested, but you don't have to if you like what you've got.
Desktop mode on the Steam Deck is using KDE Plasma. You can use that on the vast majority of Linux distros.
Here is a few the spring to mind:
- Bazzite - A good place to start, their project goal is to basically be SteamOS like experience you can put on any machine.
- Fedora Workstation with KDE - Bazzite is based off of this project, it's a more general experiance, lots of people enjoy it.
- Kubuntu - Ubuntu is very popular distro, this is their KDE version.
- OpenSuse Tumbleweed - For folks who want the most up to date software possible.
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Ehhhhh
No. Absolutely not like Steam OS it's made for gaming, yes, but that's it for the similarities.
Well I'm not aware of any Arch-based immutable distro besides SteamOS so it's kinda hard to give a perfect answer.
It doesn't have to be arch based, really
If it's immutable it practically doesn't matter
The immutability is the key here
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
The problem with using Bazzite as the solution to new users bricking their Linux installs is I've had Bazzite's update utility break itself 3 times now. I couldn't possibly recommend this distro to someone after that. I literally switched my desktop back to Arch for reliability reasons. Ridiculous.
There are stories like this for every distro, unfortunately.
Yeah but in Bazzite's case one of those issues (the one from about a year ago) hit over 99% of their users. I really think that all these people talking about how great Bazzite is either haven't been using it for long enough for the devs to have fucked up or they just haven't noticed that their system hasn't been updating for the past year.
Same. I gave up on Bazzite (for the time being) the second time it just stopped updating. The first time, I had to rebase it entirely to get it to work for a while again. I wouldn't want to put a new person through that. I'm not sure why everyone has a hard-on for immutable distros "for beginners" suddenly.
Cinnamon supports fractional scaling, mixed dpi, pretty sure it handles mixed refresh rates, and wayland support was added in mint 21.3 as experimental. I feel like you havent touched mint in 5+ years.
This is not actually true, mint supports x.org hacks for those things, not natively and properly, for example, the way mixed refresh rates work is like this: lets say you have a 60fps and 120fps monitor, both will actually run at 120, but half will be culled on the 60, meaning much worse performance and battery life... this becomes exceptionally bad if they are not clean multiples, say a 144hz and 60.
fractional scaling works in a similarly hacky way, it renders at 2x and then downscales, as does mixed dpi, meaning you're paying the full rendering cost.
they kinda work, but these are terribly hacky workarounds that are impossible to avoid due to the fundamental nature of x.org. This is not something they can fix without wayland support, which will take forever to mature into usability because their dev speed is so slow.
Bazzite, I guess.
Welcome to the world of Linux. Check out Fedora Kinoite. Here's how they're similar:
✅ It's immutable -- core OS files are read only. Just like the SteamDeck, this is more stable and secure. Updates happen all at once and the entire system can be rolled back to a working configuration ("snapshot") if it all goes south.
✅ Applications are containerized and installed via a software store. Flatpak via Flathub is my personal preference, here.
✅ It uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment. In Linux there are a handful of DEs to choose from. The SD uses KDE and so does Kinoite. This is probably where you'll see most similarities (that Windows '95 feel).
✅ Fedora's community, like the SD, is large. Got a problem? There's probably someone on the forums who had the same issue and can provide a solution.
I've been running it exclusively for two years now. As a self proclaimed distro-hopper, that's really remarkable.
No reason to choose fedora kinoite when aurora and bazzite exist, they just add some nice qol, for example, on stock kinoite ffmpeg has the shit patents that make twitch not work.
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