Last year I spent almost the entire year using Fedora (Nobara to be more precise), and at the very beggining of the year I used Ubuntu as well but had tons of problems with snaps not functioning correctly that I just gave up on that and moved to Nobara.
At the very end of the year I got a PC again and decided to install Windows 11, that's where I spent most of my time gaming after I sold my PS5 so it skews my number of games and hours played on the Steam Year in Review page.
But I'm giving myself a challenge, and with all these years of knowledge and experience behind me I think it'll be quite easy: Use Linux EXCLUSIVELY for a whole year. Only touch Windows if I absolutely have to.
For this, I chose EndeavourOS which is an Arch-based distribution that's the purest Arch outside of Arch you can get.
The things it does are configure the desktop for you, add some essential packages and add [multilib] support out of the box. It's really quite convenient and gives you all the benefits of Arch without any of the breakage from Manjaro.
Using pacman as the package manager isn't new to me, but it's as convenient as ever, and with yay as the default Arch helper, things just work straight out of the box.
I've been kind of trying to not use the AUR and use flatpaks instead, as that's what I'll use the most once I get my Steam Deck, but some stuff is just so much more convenient with the AUR.
EndeavourOS's "default" option for the desktop environment is KDE, it's what they advertise and I originally installed KDE.
But I'm a GNOME sucker, I just love the workflow, how smooth it looks, how integrated everything looks and how the GNOME team has a vision for its future (which I addmitedly don't follow 100% as I use some extensions.)
One thing of note has been my gaming experience. I've never had it this smooth on any Linux distribution, everything just works™️ right out of the box, and it's all smooth and playable.
Of course, emulators work just fine but it's the native titles and games running through Proton that really impressed me.
Ubuntu always had something or other getting in the way, but Arch/Endeavour? Nope.
Sure, you need multilib to get the best experience out of the box, but luckily Endeavour sets that up for you by default, so a "pacman -S steam" is more than enough to have fun.
Seriously, if you have been using Linux for a while and wanna try something a bit more complicated but that's still solid as hell and not hard to install, give Endeavour a try. It's great!
I've had literally zero issues, be it with apps or games or updates or whatever, it all just worked right out of the box, and even moving login managers and desktop environments, it all worked fine with no hassle.
If this distro stays stable like this throughout all the updates (which I've been doing pretty regularly as it is a rolling release), then doing my 2025 challenge of using no Windows outside of my workplace will be EASY!
Anyways, my penguin friends, thanks for reading!