Thanks for the links, I still hadn’t rebased my desktop yet so I took a before and after of both rpm-ostree and fastfetch, and saw 209 in effect

What has me still confused is that the different bazzite update tool in the testing image was also confused by the image

I mean why would it say a stable image has a testing id and bootloader if its not testing

Rebasing to normal Bazzite worked fine, but for some reason rebasing on Bazzite-DX, even when picking a specific stable image, would pull the testing image from the same day every time

Not necessarily. When Ubuntu 22.04 had an issue where systemd-oomd was killing apps that touched the swap, something like this notification would have cleared up a lot of confusion from end users, myself included.

In my experience, gaming distros primary benefit is being preconfigured with apps and patches you’d install on a normal distro.

For normal distros, this difference isn’t big enough to impact your distro choice in most cases. The reason these get recommended is due to their post-install setup being easier than the distro its based on, hence being friendlier to new Linux users.

However, for immutable distros this is a big factor as it reduces the need for layering. Layering makes updating much slower, so less is always better.

My journey went Ubuntu (2012) -> Kubuntu (2018) -> Manjaro (2020) -> Fedora KDE (2022)

Most computers I had were used and low-end so Linux was always my preferred OS, but I always dualbooted with the version of Windows or MacOS the machine came with when I could.

My current computers have been Linux only for a couple years now, thanks to Windows being a headache and MacOS being inflexible.