I don't understand why we need "gaming versions" for distros. I've never used them but if there's stuff that's broken for gaming in the base distros, shouldn't that just be fixed?

It's not necessarily broken, but for instance packages in cachy are compiled against x86-64-v3 iirc so they wouldn't work on older machines that don't support avx2

I had Manjaro previously, but it regularly had issues booting due to Plymouth. I'm not quite sure what the issue was, but Plymouth was deprecated. I switched to Fedora for a while, but finally got sick of Gnome 3. (yes, I could have just used KDE on Fedora but wanted to try out Cachy) Cachy has been pretty good, and I'm seeing much better performance in games than in Fedora, although I'm not sure how much of that is due to Fedora open-sourcing their kernel driver was responsible for the difference. (I still had the proprietary ones on Fedora)

I hope some of these work out. Honestly from a strict compatibility and ease of use standpoint nothing has been as simple or reliable for me as Ubuntu used to be. I left it due to snaps and premium nagging, but I've had the usual little "linux" quirks ever since. As much as I love cachy, my current quirk with it is that heavy disk writes tank the system aggressively. A bit of brief research suggests this might be due to using BTRFS, but I'm comfortable enough with the system that I don't want to do a total reformat right now.

I guess what I'm saying is that as much as I love linux there is still some refinement needed.

At least for Bazzite, Nobara and CachyOS, there is the SteamOS desktop option that boots directly to Steam's Big Picture that is quite unconventional in some ways (e.g. this desktop mode kinda also acts as a display manager, so there is the option to boot to your desktop from Big Picture mode and this option is generally broken without specific integration with the session manager).

Sure this could probably be a package in a more "traditional distro", but I'm almost sure most people don't expect their Display Manager to be replaced with Steam when they install a package.

Trade-offs in the default load-out, essentially - some of the things you want for games can bloat out the standard build, compromise the "license integrity" of the base repositories, make system instability more likely etc etc.

There is unlikely to be a time that "things stop moving" enough to make all these trade-offs go away, but you can pretty much just add all this stuff to the base distro yourself anyway if you want to (I still play games on vanilla Silverblue, for example).

Release-day Mesa updates is something that would be irrelevant for a normal distro, but important for a gaming one.

The proof is in the pudding:

> PikaOS Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian's cutting-edge "Unstable" branch [...] [1]

Trademark and reach.

Gaming distributions don't run a stable version of Linux distributions. They're always a spin-off from one of the popular Linux distributions (rebasing every once in a while), with additional changes tailored towards gaming.

Now, you cannot just say I call my distribution Debian GNU/Linux Gaming Edition. If you would, you'd need to work under the umbrella of Debian. With a different name, you differentiate from Debian, while you can keep the advantages of their framework (hello Ubuntu).

[1] https://distrowatch.com/pikaos

There are some things regular distros can't/shouldn't do, like including codecs still under patents, matching proprietary Nvidia drivers with the correct kernel version, proprietary firmware for game controller adapters, the launching of Steam Big Picture mode as the default UI, etc.

Because there is no need. It just the usual trend/hype.

  * Manjaro is Arch.
  * Cachy is a patched Arch (exactly what Arch avoids, heavy patching). 
  * SteamOS is Arch. 
  * Arch is Arch.