just download mint and distrohop from there until you feel settled. there’s too many options to make a final decision from the start. mint works out of the box and you get get a hang of it.

OR use cachyos but prepare to open the archwiki frequently

bazzite is not meaningfully tinker-proof. Ask a person who says that what they can’t do and they can never answer something that you actually can’t do.

Can highly recommend Bazzite. You can install most applications and terminal programs no problem through flatpak/brew and config any well behaved package through settings files in your home directory anyways. If you really need specific system level packages, then it’s quite straightforward tinkering to setup a GitHub repo that builds a daily image for you based on Bazzite. If you break something, you just roll back to a previous build.

And for testing out new “live” packages: you can! Just make sure you don’t forget to persist them into your custom image if it turns out to be a useful addition.

I think I added just a handful packages on top of Bluefin (the non-gaming version) and it runs rather merrily.

Immutable sounds locked down, but to me it’s more like highly reproducible tinkering. Just keep your home dir clean ✨

I would definitely give Bazzite a try. If you are looking for stability and a set and forget OS. If you don’t like it you could always try something else.

If you are looking for something to tinker with and change things like manually changing packages or messing with services you probably want a more traditional “non-atomic” os

Don’t let talk of the filesystem being “read only” scare you. You can still save files to your desktop and documents and stuff in your user folder.

In windows terms it’s more like imagine C:/windows being read-only so you can’t break your system. You can still write files to other parts of the drive, but it prevents you from messing up your install (some people like this added layer or stability, some don’t like it because it makes tinkering with your system harder)

An atomic OS is kinda like a phone OS, in the sense that every version of iOS 26 comes with the same version of Safari and the same libraries. It makes it so any bugs are reproducible and easier for the developers to track down. Packages are pinned to the OS version. (For example all installs of Bazzite 20260101 will include Nvidia drivers 590.44.01-1)

In a more traditional Linux distro because packages can be updated to whatever version if you install Ubuntu the version of Nvidia drivers is not tied to the OS version. You could have an install of Ubuntu 25.10 and could have a completely different Nvidia driver version from someone else on Ubuntu 25.10. This could make bugs harder to trace because you could have the same OS version but different packages. Think of this like even though you and a friend could both have (Windows 11 25H2 installed you could have different drivers installed)

As for updating Bazzite generally auto updates once a week in the background. It requires 0 manual intervention and keeps your packages and drivers up to date. You can turn this off if you wanted to. Since it uses a “image” based approach (again imagine upgrading from iOS 26 -> 26.1) it is able to save the previous version of the OS. So if the upgrade broke something you can roll your system back to a known good state with a single command.

If you are looking for something that’s set and forget I would definitely give it a try.

If you want to tinker with it and figure out how Linux works I would probably try arch or something

There’s a lot of well meaning but not too well informed advice in here. Since one of your goals is gaming, stay away from Mint. It can be made to work (well), but you have to get there. It’s basically the recommendation people gave for decades, but there have been massive improvements through many distros while mint just kinda stood still. There’s still some things they do rather well though.

CachyOS will do what you want it to, and it is what I switched to like 8 months ago. It isn’t maintenance heavy at all if you don’t want it to be. I think I had to intervene once since I started using it, but that intervention was necessary or it wouldn’t have booted after updates. The official updater will tell you when that’s the case, as it lists critical news like that. Otherwise it just works, and it’s pre-configured and optimized for gaming. Under the hood it’s basically Arch, just without the fiddling of getting it to a usable state. Because of that they’re is also an enormous amount of information out there (Arch wiki) on how to do stuff.

Bazzite is a stark contrast in many ways as it’s an immutable distro, but also pre-configured and optimized (maybe not quite as much as CachyOS). It will also do what you want just fine. It is relatively “safe” due to the immutability, and updates are much rarer (and by definition always whole system updates). I don’t know exactly how you’d run your services, but assuming they are dockerized or similar that should be just fine, but please do some searching before if it does contain what you need in the base image (presumably docker and docker compose).

I had horrible experience with Bazzite. Installer somehow corrupted a separate win10 installation on another drive, I couldn’t get Samba 1 to connect to a network share, ‘ujust updating’ caused boot to black screen, and in general the online support is abysmal compared to older more established distros like Ubuntu.

Wiped and installed (win10 again, and) Mint fixed all the issues. Samba 1 unlocking works so the network drive is accessible, updated everything with one click and it didn’t crash on reboot, both OS’s appear in the boot list, and it being much older the support is far easier to obtain as a newbie.

Literally just installed Mint (and reinstalled), a couple days ago so I’m as wet behind the ears as they come. IMO the people recommending Bazzite don’t care of their system breaks and it takes 2 hours to fix every 2nd week (I assume this will improve as you gain xp with the BS/Bazzite Software).

Bazzite is good for gaming and general computing. If you want to run servers or tinker with the OS at all it becomes annoying and impractical.

Fedora is stable, with modern packages, and is what Bazzite is based off of. I’d probably recommend that.

Debian is rock-solid stable, but lacks newer packages. It’s great for a server, not so great for gaming and general computing.

I’ve heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down

No this is generally put out there by people that don’t understand the workflow of an atomic distro. Yes the file system directories are generally readonly. You can still layer packages, or use flatpaks and sysexts to add software or install things in a container. There is nothing much that can’t be achieved in an atomic/immutable distro, its just a different workflow. If you want something unbreakable an atomic distro is the way to go

Do you know about piping? It changed everything for me back then. People do the weirdest complicated things that are mostly a few piped commands. One command if you master awk 🤣 but let’s not go there.

Debian. It’s rock solid. You don’t need anything flashy or new fangled if you’re just building a home server.

I wouldn’t suggest bazzite or cachyos for a newbie.

Check out Nobara. It is based on Fedora, comes out of the box with everything Bazzite has for gaming (Steam, gamepad/joystick support, etc…) but is not an immutable distro and not as heavily locked down.

I’ve been a Windows systems admin professionally for 20+ years and although I’ve managed a few Linux systems professionally, at home I’ve mainly used Debian for tinkering, running Docker, and dedicated servers for me and my friends. My personal PCs have always been Windows based.

I really wanted to use a Debian based distro, because its what I have most familiarity with, but there just isn’t one that isn’t Ubuntu based or updated frequently enough for the gaming I like to do. I’m sticking to Deb for my servers. Fedora is just as mature and reliable, and gives me the degree of control I want over system config without being cumbersome. I have some pretty specific network config and software requirements that necessitated some tinkering in /etc and .conf files that Bazzite was not going to let me do.

I also wanted a PC that just worked, minimal tinkering. I do not want to spend my gaming time trying to troubleshoot obscure Linux issues. My personal PC use is like 80% gaming. I have a good virtual infra home lab setup. A Synology NAS that holds my music/movies/file archives.

Nobara setup was a snap. Ditto installing Discord. Both webcam and headset were auto detected. I installed a few flatpak apps including VLC, Putty, Firefox (preferred browser). VLC was able to stream video/audio from my NAS without any additional changes.

Fired up Steam, installed Elite Dangerous, plugged in a T16000 HOTAS joystick and done. Was playing that same night. Ditto any games using my Xbone gamepad.

The only fishing I have had to do online for remedies and workarounds have been related to some small 3rd party apps I use to support games like Elite Dangerous. Most additional software I’ve installed via Flatpak, which is amazing. However, by design flatpak apps run in sandboxed environments and are not given full/free access to the file system. (this is a great thing). I’ve added Flatseal to give me a GUI for modifying flatpak app permissions when needed. (Discord, for example, needed additional permissions to allow me to copy/paste screenshots/pics into chat)

I created a separate partition for installed games. Most guides offering help on installed games assume games/apps are installed or looking in your /home folder, but for me it was on a separate volume, which required permissions tweaking or just looking in a different path.

I cut over during the holiday break. Overall, the transition has been seamless and painless.

Given your requirements, absolutely I’d also recommend against Bazzite and CachyOS, at least today.

Debian stable. Enable security updates by unattended-upgrades and you can basically go over a year without manually updating (aside from the occasional reboot to activate the newer kernel).

Then if you’re not already into containers, I propose learning about rootless Podman and using that to run your arr stack services. For example using docker-compose and/or systemd services.

If you don’t mind going a little bit more of the beaten track, then I also encourage you to check out Alpine Linux. Their wiki explains how to install it with a read-only root filesystem which it sounds like you’d like. But since it’s early and a commitment, maybe save this adventure for later.

Arch has a like 10x more update churn than Debian or sth and is not stable in the same sense.

For a more hands-on system, or something offline, Arch is still great.

Okay, aside from all the distro advice, I have some practical install advice.

There’s a program called Ventoy. At ventoy.net

Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and Ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them

Most distros these days have a live CD option, meaning you can run the distro and test how it feels without actually committing to an install.

So, take all the distro options here and throw them all on a thumb drive with ventoy installed, then you can simply boot into each one.

Now, my personal fav distro is called Garuda. It excells at gaming, and can do everything you want, but will put a red blinking icon in the task bar if you don’t update every week or so.

Garuda is Arch based.

If you game, Bazzite with KDE is damn near perfect. I’ve been running it for a year and never had a problem making it do what I want it to do.

I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS.

Bazzite is immutable, updates are easy and not bothersome, and if for any reason one ever breaks something, a single command (sudo rpm-ostree rollback), you go back to the previous state, easy peasy.

It’s being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich

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.

Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work?

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.