So, I came across PikaOS - a gaming-focused debian-based distro that also has a cosmic flavor.
Apparently they’ve done various optimizations to the kernel and whatnot, there’s a set of GUIs for distro-related stuff such as updates, has a release schedule, etcetc - so I went ahead and tested the live media on my system (nvidia version).
Clicking around the desktop threw up a few questions about this release, which people here may or may not be able to answer:
-Will I be able to modify the login screen/theme after installing?
-Can you change the mouse cursor? I couldn’t find a setting
-If I choose not to install the gaming meta package since I don’t use any other launcher other than steam, how “important” would it be to install vkbasalt and falcond and whatever is apparently “improving” my gaming experience? I mostly play older games such as PoE, Terraria and RoR2, so I don’t really mess with DLSS/RTX and the likes too much.
-Since the distro is based on debian sid, there’ll be more updates compared to trixie would be my guess. If you leave the update interval on a somewhat default value like 12/24h, do you usually get a bunch of things to update like with arch? (I could set the value to 7 days in hours but I’d rather have an option for that - possibly in a future release?)
-PikaOS doesn’t seem to be as much talked about as other large distros like mint/cachy/bazzite/etc so how future-proof is the thing? I’d rather not use a distro where the devs one day lose interest and scrap the project (obviously this may also happen with nobara/archcraft/omarchy etcetc)
-I run an AMD Ryzen 7700X with a nvidia RTX 4060 (yea I know) and 32GB ram. How’s the performance compared to my current setup (endeavourOS/Cinnamon) where I’m not using any manually added “gaming improvements” except gamemode, also in terms of boot times and app execution times?
-how buggy/bug-free is the distro?
While I don’t mind distrohopping every now and then, I currently feel that I’m at a point where my system feels pretty complete and responsive, so I dunno if I would even benefit from this distro putting aside the DE. Maybe someone in this community has some experience with pikaos and can provide some insights?
Would it not be best to go to their forums and ask these questions? While I’m sure maybe someone around here may use it I’m not sure there are many nor how active they are here.
They don’t seem to have a forum, only discord and reddit (which I don’t use).
I figured that since most (?) of this community, like myself, use endeavourOS, they may also have tried out pikaOS and thus would be able to answer
I haven’t tested Cosmic out since the last LTS release and am unsure if they have fixed the issues that I and many others seemed to be experiencing at that point. In my opinion Cosmic at this point in time is not ready for people new to Linux or cannot troubleshoot issues. If you wish to use PikaOS perhaps try one of the other DEs they provide.
Maybe create a throw away email to use their discord forum? As they would be able to answer a lot of these questions a lot easier.
I agree and I disagree.
It’s good to be real time, back and forth. It’s bad for being able to research/document anything. I don’t want to provide support on discord
And if it’s a busy channel, hard to tell what is for you…etc.
Unlike a forum where you can revisit a thread created for your issue, on Discord you need to scroll all over to find answers to your question. Extremely inconvenient.
PIcaOS used to be a toy for me as opposed to Fedora 44 Cosmic where all important things like snapshot handling, hibernate, suspend etc. could be googled easily.
I haven’t relied on Fedora forum yet.
Cosmic is at version 1.0 enjoyable for me and haven’t had real issues.
I do not miss the 30 year of direct heritage of KDE in it.
I used endeavour kde for over a year and recently switched to pika kde. I’m not really sure what to think. I miss the AUR. I liked how little endeavour included in the initial install, but I think my games run a smidge faster on pika with the custom kernel for gaming. (Could be in my head) My printer set up WAY easier on pika, and it automatically grabbed the driver’s for my controllers and headset. But… Pacman and yay are WAY faster to get stuff that I want. I thought going back to a gui package manager would be nice, but I was wrong. The discover store gui has been slow and froze on me a couple times after switching to pikaos.
I’m fairly inexperienced with linux and have only used Ubuntu and mint in addition to the other two that are the topic of this thread. Endeavouros is my favorite so far. I had basically no crashes and only one time I had to go to the forums to get help when pacman broke some stuff. Kde seemed more polished on endeavouros. Will probably be back soon.
