Hey everyone! I'm finally fed up with Win11 and the bullshit that comes with it for the PC it's on.
It's being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich, and gaming PC for the living room.
I'm currently in the process of backing up all my important info and am doing research on which distro to use.
I don't mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key. I don't want to have to go in and update it every week... I want this one to work with minimal maintenance on my part.
I'd likely update it a few times a year, knowing me.
A few hardware specs:
MSI mobo (I've learned that UEFI can be a pain), 10600k, 2070 gpu, and will have a pool of 3x8tb drives that I would like to have in raid5 (or something similar) for storage (movies, TV shows, and Immich libraries), the OS will have its own drive, and I have a separate SSD that I have been using to store programs, games, yml's for docker, and other such things that get accessed more frequently, but aren't crucial if lost.
I've kinda narrowed it down to either Bazzite or CachyOS.
I've heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down, which I'm not a fan of, but CachyOS has features I will likely never touch (schedulers, kernels, etc...).
I don't want an upkeep heavy OS. I'm moving away from windows for that reason. Win11 has been a nightmare for me with constant reboots and things not loading up until after I log in. Not to mention driver conflicts and all the other BS that's come with it.
So... What say the hive mind? Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work? Or do I have it all wrong with my perception of both?
Thanks!
Ps: this will be my first full commit to Linux. I've dabbled in the past and am no stranger to CLI... So this will likely be a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux. Go easy on me lol
for those applications any distro that lets you use docker and docker compose. If you don't know how to use them, do yourself a favor and learn. It makes self-hosting so much easier and makes the base OS almost irrelevant.
Since you seem set on these two, go with Bazzite. Between Distrobox and Docker, Bazzite being an immutable OS seems like a non-issue. After you play around with it, if you feel like you want something that could potentially require more of your time but gives you a little more control, go with CachyOS but ensure you are using ZFS, btrfs, or some other file system that allows rollbacks.
I've distro-hopped a lot over the years. Ubuntu (most flavors), Fedora, Debian, Arch, Solus, EndeavourOS, CentOS, Alma, more I'm forgetting, and even some BSDs. Out of all of them, I keep going back to Ubuntu for my servers. I like the release cycles, it's never given me any issues that I didn't cause myself, the packages are new enough, the installer lets you set up ZFS and 3rd party tools/software (like Nvidia drivers), and there is a ton of documentation. I want my server to be an appliance, not something I tinker with, and Ubuntu does that really well. If I do feel like tinkering, I do it in a VM or container.
Docker has been the deployment method of choice, thus far, and the plan is to continue that method since I'm already familiar.
I'm not attached to either, I've seen a lot of people recommend them. Debian has gotten more than a few recommendations in this thread, so I'm checking out PikaOS now.
As much as I didn't want to, it's really seeming like I'm going to need to pick a few a test them out. Bazzite, CachyOS, and PikaOS are all on the list right now. Plan to install steam, install a game or two, and see how things go there. Followed up by a potentially small deployment of Jellyfin and a tiny library to see how easy it is to get hardware transcoding up and running.
You mentioned ZFS or other file systems... And that brings up another question I forgot to add to the OP.... As of right now. The plan is to have the media files on the 3 disk pool. I was planning on using ZFS for that, but hadn't landed on a FS for the OS drive and other storage drive.
Is it common practice to use one FS across all drives? Or would ZFS work well enough on its own for the pool and use a different FS for the OS/storage drives?
While you can put your root filesystem on ZFS and many people do it, it is considered a little more advanced setup and it's more common to run ext4 on
/and then zfs for mounted datasets on e.g./varand/home.A catch with ZFS is that it does not have a compatible license with Linux, which prevents many distros from shipping compiled modules directly. So the most common way to ship it is by DKMS, which (automatically) compiles the ZFS module from source. This is done by installing the
zfs-dkmspackage.The ZFS version obviously needs to be compatible with your kernel and sometimes it can take a while for ZFS to Linux. Arch does not coordinate releases so especially if you're not on the LTS kernel, you can run into situations where ZFS is no longer available after an upgrade. Furthermore,
zfs-dkmsis not in Arch repos but in AUR so you have to build even that from source for each upgrade of ZFS. Not recommended for beginners.That a partial or failed system upgrade can leave you in a place without ZFS modules is one reason why putting
/on ZFS is not more common.In debian, you just
apt-get install zfs-dkms.Alpine Linux maintainers decided to just ignore the license issue and ship a compiled
zfspackage including kernel modules.Nice 😎
The biggest problem you are going to have is the NVIDIA graphics card. As long as you overcome the hurdle of installing those drivers, any of the popular desktop OSs should be fine. Some people seem to get them going no problem but for others, it’s a show stopper. The OSs that have the option for installing the drivers during installation are nice for that reason.
Yeah. Unfortunately that’s going to be the best way to learn what you want from your OS. It’s equally frustrating and rewarding.
Depends on the environment, really; there’s no wrong answer. ZFS will work fine for its own pool. I would say a FS with snapshotting and rollback capabilities are almost a requirement for Arch based/rolling release distros. You never know when an update might break something.
I’ve been testing out ZFS on my OS drive for my personal server and it’s probably overkill because all the important stuff is on the ZFS pool with backups. My OS drive could shit the bed at any moment and I could switch it out with anything else because of that pool.