I mean...Steam OS on Steam Deck...and probably on PC when they release that. If you mean on PC now, Kubuntu. Because I like KDE and Ubuntu is well-supported.
Using Linux Mint Cinnamon for most things currently, gaming included. I've been dabbling with the gnome DE so I can use Wayland, and it's been nice. However, I'm not as big of the DE and don't have time to tweak things to my preferences so I use it sparingly.
I installed Garuda on my main desktop PC and have been absolutely loving it. I'm not a linux expert, this is the first time I've dived in with my main pc on linux only (but I have been "trying" linux every so often for as long as I can remember basically). It is amazing how far Linux has come in just the last few years. It is very close to what I would consider a full replacement mainstream OS. I am on a fully AMD system though, so I can't speak for nvidia issues (but honestly I've been sick of them even under windows for a few years now...).
I can’t name specific solutions off the top of my head as I haven’t done it in a while, but Yes. There are many live distros that offer an optional ‘overlayFS’ (I think that’s the right term) which reserves some of your portable drive’s storage for persistent changes to apply over the base live FS.
Combine that with git and/or NextCloud or an SSH file mount or three and you could probably come up with a complete mobile setup that also has quick access to whatever home server infrastructure you need. 128GB or 256GB USB sticks are pretty cheap now which is plenty for a spacious install. Or even a small USB SSD.
Don't use USB stick, it has really awful random read / write performance. I recommend fast SSD with cache. I tried USB stick solution several years ago and it was so laggy it was unusable
I inherited a crappy laptop (4 core atom processor, with 4 gigs of RAM, fear the power!) because Windows was running slow on it. I decided to try different Linux distros booting from a USB and had no issues. I literally ran the system for months off of a Sandisk USB drive, and it was faster than the spindle drive in the machine.
My recommendation is, don't cheap out on the USB drive. No-name drives are fine for word files, but the performance increase from a Sandisk, Samsung, Kingston or equivalent is worth it for any media transfers and will work fine for a bootable Linux.
A good workaround for this is to add toram to your kernel command line. This loads the whole image into RAM before booting, which speeds things up dramatically at the expense of using more of your RAM while idle.
I'm using Nobara. It's a gaming tweaked Fedora with a bunch of gaming and steaming related software preinstalled and configured. Works well in my experience.
Same, started using it on a pc connected to my tv (for a console like experience, boots straight into gamescope/steam).
Now I also use it on my desktop (replacing Ubuntu).
I've been using PopOS and Steam installed in Flatpak, as well as native and both have worked really well. Lutris i have installed through flatpak, as otherwise it sometimes gave me issues. This is running really well on my AMD 5950x and 6800XT
Mint for my desktop, SteamOS on Deck. Both do what I need, and the only issues I've run into since switching have been random things like GOG not having an updated Planescape Torment build that works out of the box. I don't play many online competitive games with like invasive anti-cheat stuff, so I haven't run into a ton of compatibility issues.
Honestly, I wouldn't make any specific recommendation. Because when you do, you instantly become most peoples personal support technician, when they can't sort something out.
I'd probably make the general suggestions of Fedora/Silverblue/Kinoite, openSUSE Tumbleweed/Aeon/Kalpa, and maybe Pop!_OS if somebody put a gun to my head. But no recommendations.
The way it was explained to me was Fedora = RHEL Alpha, CentOS Stream = RHEL Beta, RHEL is Stable, then there are downstreams who build against RHEL. Only those who are downstream of REHL are effected by the changes. Both Fedora and Cent are necessary development platforms to support everything that eventually makes it down to RHEL in stable condition. They both depend on RHEL for funding, but RHEL depends on them for testing.
It is doable to install an OS onto a flash drive or external drive, but from my experience it was really slow. Just need to make sure to then boot the machine to the USB device. Some machines you might find it difficult to change that in the BIOS.
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