Requirements:
- Must be more user friendly than LFS
- Must not be in the RHEL/IBM family/stream or derivative
- Must not be SLES or derivative
- Does not make you install a desktop environment
- Must have steam
Hopes
- Rolling release
- Has a package manager of some sort
- Doesn’t require manual intervention every six months
- Maintainers aren’t psycho
CachyOS or plain Arch
Debian. Set it to stable instead of trixie and it’s kind of a rolling release. Testing if you want newer versions. You won’t get breakage unless you use sid.
Does that have issues? Part of the reason I’m looking for a rolling release is way back in the late 2000’s, you could upgrade Ubuntu but things always broke and so you might as well reinstall
I’ve not had issues doing distro upgrades in a long time, and I mess with my systems a lot. There’s been a lot of progress in 15+ years, and Debian is usually pretty good about keeping stuff working.
I suppose if time has indeed passed by 15 years I could give it another shot. I’m moving my mail server from bookworm to trixie by… getting another VPS, testing out configs against trixie, then switching over
Debian. Set it to stable instead of trixie and it’s kind of a rolling release.
Testing or Unstable would be kind of like a rolling release.
Stable currently is Trixie, and has a release cycle of roughly 1-2 years. It’s not a rolling release. (However, OP’s comments make it seem like they’re just trying to avoid major breakage during release upgrades, in which case Debian Stable might still be a good pick so long as they read the release notes before upgrading.)
This is an unusual combination of requirements:
- Does not make you install a desktop environment
- Must have steam
I guess maybe you’re planning to use the same distro for a server and a gaming system? Debian can do that. I recommend enabling Debian Backports on the gaming system, for access to recent kernel/firmware/mesa packages (you pick which ones you need).
By the way, markdown ate your list formatting because you didn’t put a space between the - and the text.
Thanks, fixed formatting.
I just run i3wm. It’s easier to do get to where I’m going if it never installs gnome to begin with.
Opensuse tumbleweed, lets you select or unselect any DE you want. Right before confirming install summary with Next you click the software link and are brought to the package patterns , and then can go to details and uncheck everything and just click packages you want for the system.
Sorry don’t do SUSE
Tumbleweed is a community distro before SUSE in the chain, new innovations that are proved out go from TW to SUSE, then Leap is derived from SUSE with shared binaries. Unless there are other issues you don’t like besides SUSE/leap corporate?
Similar to fedora, I try not to use distros in the stream/family of an enterprise system I dislike. Right now, that’s RHEL and SLES
NixOS is pretty nice imo.
It’s pretty stable, has a good package manager, and is quite declarative thanks to the Nix language based config. It also supports Steam and has a dedicated “Games” page in the wiki (https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Games).
Downside is it’s unlike pretty much every other distro, and could have a steep learning curve.
Been using it about a year without problems, would recommend.
If you want it to be more friendly than LFS, but not by too much, take a look at Gentoo.
Main feature is the ease of compiling software instead of grabbing binary packages, so, update times can get a bit out of hand depending on what you want on your system.