This is a story all about how… one sad old sack finally “got” Linux distros.

I’ve been a very casual Linux user over 20-odd years, mostly on secondary PCs and generally sticking with noob-friendly distros, but only in the last few months I’ve become serious and started to learn the how and why of Linux.

Like many others, this year is my own personal year of Linux on the desktop. My server, media box and laptops are all now running Fedora, only my primary PC remains left behind on Win10 because of critical software keeping me tied to Windows - but from next week that is no longer needed and the shackles are off! I’ve sampled several different Distros this year to find the perfect fit for this very moment, but this search reminded me how the sheer number of distros annoyed me.

I’ve always seen the vast number of Distros as wasteful. Effort that could be put into pushing Linux forward rather than creating another fork sideways. I’m not sure now what I thought a distro actually was but I’ve now come to realise the genius of this (not to say there isn’t any replication and waste between Distros).

I had settled on KDE Fedora as my distro of choice some time ago. Then, when I found the idea of an immutable distro, this appealed (to help prevent my dumb-arse breaking things), so I pivoted to Kinoite to give me exactly what I wanted. All I needed was to work out how to get Steam running. Many of you can probably already see where this is going.

In a moment of Picard-level face-palming, I started exploring Bazzite thinking this would give me an idea of what’s required. The distro itself looked good and when I went digging deeper, I found an Immutable, Fedora base in either KDE or Gnome. Bazzite is basically Atomic Fedora, pre-configured for gaming! Face-smack. Maybe I thought Bazzite was based on Arch which is why I hadn’t looked at it before, but now I better understood the genius of Linux distros. The Bazzite team could take the core of what they want, then tweak it for a specific use-case and release it, thinking others might like it too. They’re not reinventing the wheel as I first believed, they were building upon previous work. One of the greatest strengths of open source. I probably already knew this but somehow, I hadn’t quite put the pieces together in one place.

TL;DR: I’m a numpty

Tune in tomorrow when I argue that no one should recommend Arch to anyone - and why that’s a good thing…