Onihikage

Thanks for bringing up the display managers and Wayland support, I don’t know enough to weigh in on those.

And understand that its not a choice just between those two DEs.

If OP sticks with Mint, that would be the case, but Bazzite only has two DEs right now (KDE and Gnome, with Budgie “coming soon”). OP doesn’t sound like they want to tinker much, they just want something that works with a modern GPU and will keep working. Bazzite certainly fits that use-case, at least in my experience.

They’re mostly equivalent, but I think KDE has the edge when it comes to customization, included utilities, and advanced features. The Apple/Windows comparison is not limited to their look and feel, it also applies to the philosophical differences between the Gnome and KDE teams. If you plan to use SteamVR, KDE is supposedly better for that specific use case, but I can’t personally verify that.

The feature sets and quality of both DEs are constantly improving, so a comparison from 6 months or a year ago could already be outdated. I haven’t used Gnome in quite a few years, so I’m basing this entirely on what others have said about it.

If you want to use newer hardware, and would rather not tinker with the system to get it working (and then have to maintain that tinkering yourself if something breaks later), Bazzite is probably the better option. It’s based on Fedora Atomic which is almost identical to rolling-release like Arch. I switched from Windows to Bazzite more than a year ago and have personally had no major issues, never had to mess with drivers or kernel updates due to the image-based system, and pretty much everything I might need for some workaround or another is included in the image. The community is very active on both the Discord and the web forum, and the documentation on the website is good as well, so there’s no shortage of help and available resources if you run into an issue or don’t know how to do something.

The main thing you need to be aware of going in is to be sure of which Desktop Environment you want (KDE or Gnome), because their user-space configs (which are not part of the image) interfere with each other so you can’t really switch between them without breaking a lot of things. Coming from Windows, I picked KDE and have been very happy with it.

They said they’re getting a 9070xt - that is an AMD GPU.

I don’t know what it is but it feels like i went from crashing like maybe once a week, to multiple times a day as time has gone on.

Make sure to disable all autosaves, disable quicksaves, and never save over an existing save. Something about Bethesda’s save system has never quite worked properly when overwriting existing saves (which is how autosave and quicksave function), you have to force it to create new saves and manually delete the old ones yourself later.

After the remaster came out, I started replaying the original with a small modlist, and saw similar degradation in stability until I remembered to do that. Currently it’ll crash if I’ve had the game open more than a couple of hours, so I just manually save often and restart the game any time I feel like it’s been open for a while. It doesn’t seem to be getting worse anymore so I think I’m in the clear.