I’ve been toying with Linux on and off for almost 20 years now.
Started with damnsmalllinux on some ancient 600mhz Thinkpads. Dual booted Ubuntu for a long time, back when 3d desktop cubes were all the rage, so I’m used to gnome, synaptic and apt.
Tried to stick with it, but never could get away from Windows entirely. Especially for gaming, and a few critical apps. Eventually I kind of drifted away, and went full Windows for years. I always keep an Ubuntu LTS thumb drive around, and would use it occasionally for various reasons, testing etc etc.
Recently I installed Ubuntu 24.04, and had tons of stability issues. Mostly involving video output and the GUI. Screen would jitter left and right a few pixels. And sometimes maximized windows would be transparent to clicks, so you’d be clicking random stuff below the window. This was especially bad with Firefox and VLC, separately. I also had issues with removable drives not mounting properly. Standard stuff, I wasn’t doing anything weird. Practically a fresh install.
So I tried Mint, cinnamon. And so far I really like it! I’ve not been running it daily, but just the same tinkering. And so far no issues at all. But that got me thinking, what else am I missing?
I’m comfortable in the command line, but not proficient, I appreciate a good GUI for most things.
I plan to do some gaming, so steam proton compatibility is important. I don’t think that’s hard to achieve, but I wanted to make sure, it’s important to me.
Last time I played with KDE was a decade ago, I hear there’s lots of new developments going on there? In plasma? Unless plasma is different now, IDK I haven’t looked extremely hard.
I don’t care much about customization, I don’t want arch. I want something that is a pretty solid base, with decent features, and good support for when this go sideways. I feel like that’s not Ubuntu anymore. Especially with them pushing into Wayland and flat packs.
I guess my question is, does Mint seem like a good distro to start with? Or am I not looking hard enough?
Thanks!
I highly recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed (or Slowroll). It is a rock-solid rolling-release where most things can be done from the YaST GUI. The installer is very granular, you can pick and choose based on groups of programs (like internet, office, desktop environment, etc) or individual packages (in advanced mode).
It has never broke on me and I have used it on and off for several years now. I like to tinker so I often do reinstalls of other distros when I break them but never needed to with Tumbleweed.
It is modern but not unfamiliar, rolling but not unstable, granular but not overwhelming (imho).
If rolling-release isn’t your thing there is also openSUSE Slowroll which does updates monthly (apart from security updates which are back ported)
Even if you don’t pick Tumbleweed, there are plenty of good options. Rapid fire I’ll recommend some others.
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Fedora Workstation: my next favorite distros for many of the same reasons as Tumbleweed, semi-rolling and major updates every 6 months, but no YaST or granular installer. It uses GNOME desktop environment.
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Fedora Atomic: pretty much Fedora Workstation but more stable because the root filesystem is read-only and updates are pushed as an OCI image. You can still install anything supported by Fedora.
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Universal Blue: Modified versions of Fedora Atomic which aim to be much more user-friendly and preconfigured out of the box. I recommend them over Fedora Atomic vanilla images. Bazzite is my recommendation for any gamer on Linux (though most distros work).
If you want to have a good experience on Linux, avoid perpetually out of date distros like Debian/Ubuntu and their derivatives. Linux game support is always improving, same thing with basically everything, so dont kneecap yourself with slow/stable release distros.
Interesting! First mention of opensuse I think. I’ve always heard of it but never checked it out.
The Fedora recommendations are really stacking up though. A lot of emphasis is being put on the benefits of being up to date. I hadn’t realized it was that important, but I’m inclined to believe it.
Thanks for the recommendations! What are your thoughts on bazzite? Being Fedora atomic based.
I’ll second tumbleweed. I use it on 4 separate devices and its rarely given me any issues. If it does, it has built-in recovery snapshots - it takes 30 seconds to roll back a bad update.
Bazzite is good. Gaming focused. I had a friend jump ship from Windows and it was the only one that worked right away with their nvidia GPU.
It being fedora atomic based means you can rollback an unsuccessful update from the grub menu during boot up.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’m excited to give these distros a try!
Np, I Iove Linux (lol) so I’m glad to share.
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Mint is amazing and frankly if its working for you then I think you’ve found it. I stayed on mint for a long time until I relented to a nagging friend and tried out NIxOS and was amazed. If you have the technical skills and feel confident to push through the inital difficulty its well well worth it.
So whats the good?
- Reproducibility. Ever been annoyed that someone cant help you because they either dont have the time or just cant reproduce the problem? Its no longer an issue. Dependancy is managed by design so configuration and state is transferable with as little as only two files.
- Declarative. Best way to decibe this is all the benefits of Arch and zero of the problems. Declare your configuration in a file and then have a life. Ive never saved so much time before with any distro. Imaging installing windows, configuring the OS, installing apps, configuring them only once, ever, never having to do that again. Reinstalls go straight back to the way you like it.
- Reliable. Ive never had a linux distro so stable. The risk and pain of change is a thing of the past.
- Largest and most up to date repo. Its simply unmatched.
- The list goes on to other areas like security, scalability and much more but lets leave it there.
Whats the bad?
- Difficulty of entry. You need to have basic understanding on writting basic code to some degree as you define your config as a simple text file. I recommend vimjoyer on youtube he has some great simple intro videos that will help here.
- Using apps not in the repo. You will need to step up your config skills here to install that weird app you want. That is only unless you cant wait. If you have time the community is fantastic, a quick app request on the repo has a great chance of being picked up by some legend and added to the repo officially.
- The wiki, its no Arch wiki, thankfully you dont really need it. The community maintains a bunch of configs for hardware and apps on the repo which is weirdly not advertised half as much as it should be. Alternatively just search github for configs from other nixians.
Yeah, nixos is great in some aspects, but a newcomer will be very displeased with a lot of nix specific things. And having quite bad documentation is no help either.
I made it very clear about the barrier to entry for nix and frankly I don’t think you give OP enough credit. They sound quite capable already familiar with mint
That’s quite the glowing recommendation for nixOS!
Definitely a learning curve to installation, but I like the idea of config once/cry once, then in the future you’d never have to do it again. I’m just wondering how true that is in practice? Like, I configure it once, but over the course of a few years I install a bunch of stuff. Do I have to keep my config file manually up to date? Or once I’m up and running does this happen automatically?
I’m not opposed to a fair amount of cli legwork to things up and running, if the payoff is as good as you say.
I’m definitely curious about this distro, thanks!
Thanks. Nix made me a convert back from Windows. Microsoft doesn’t innovate anymore like they used to. iMO the origional concepts that sparked nix and now others like it has been a breath of fresh air into a stagnated critical cornerstone of the industry. Imagine being able to install every version of a dependancy like say .net thats ever been released without it causing a problem.
Install is imo better than even Windows, install from media, highly recommend kde plasma or gnome on your first round, but hey its nix, sky is the limit. Hardware will autodetect so long as you dont have anything out of ordinary.
Config once cry once cant be over stated enough how good it is. As for your concern about changes its really simple. Make the change, run the update command from terminal, reboot and if it fails (rare) juat reboot again and select your previous config, it keeps as many configs as you want to. I now only maintain the last 5 and run a cleanup confidently.
To update to the latest versions of apps and os its one command in terminal and nix checks your config for errors before updating. Some people run bleeding edge versions & update daily getting nightly apps, OS, and kernel even without issue. I sit on unstable, silly name, its stable as all hell, you just get the latest releases and features.
My worst experience was moving to home manager, but it was well worth it. The error nix presented was meaningless, the real error was just buried and I had to use journald to find the meaningful error.
What ever distro you use enjoy the freedom! Mint is great, Nix is great!
I also like that Mint comes with an Office suite and Timeshift pre-installed.
Debian with XFCE here - I do just have a single monitor though so I suppose I’m not running into complicated display issues anytime soon. It has been extremely solid, I forget to update my system for months on end and then remember to do it one day and it just works. XFCE is boring like Debian but that’s why I like it: it stays out of my way.
I work on RHEL at my day job so Linux isn’t just a hobby for me, and I love being free from Windows. Honestly the only thing I keep a windows VM around for is an installation of Adobe Acrobat PDF reader because I’m too lazy to set up signatures on Linux since I don’t sign that many documents anyway. And maybe a couple of windows servers from a few keys I’ve got lying around to learn AD on.
I use mint on my daily-driver/gaming-rig/mediaserver. I’ve been a Linux user for 20 years, eventually you just want a normal distro with sane defaults. Mint is wonderful.
Yet another vote for Mint! I’m going to test drive all of these, but so far I think I’m tied between mint/lmde and bazzite.
Objectively bazzite is much better for beginners, the mint crowd is a bit out of date, here’s why:
bazzite is immutable, that means it updates a core system all at once with previous versions easily selectable if something breaks.
there are more advantages to immutability, and one of those is that bazzite has significantly more up to date software, this matters for a huge number of reasons, bazzite has a much more up to date desktop with vastly improved features. Mint will also hold these features back for much longer because if something goes wrong it’s catastrophic, whereas for bazzite you’d just revert to the previous version. Not that it’s likely for anything to go wrong.
Back in the day mint was the best choice, but now that this innovation has spread bazzite is just better, and the mint people haven’t updated their choice/preference. I honestly think there’s no objective reason to recommend mint over bazzite to beginners.
Bazzite is also more secure because it’s sandboxed ontop of being less likely to catastrophically fail because of immutability.
Interesting, this is the first I’ve heard of Mint being behind the curve on updates.
I do like the idea of bazzite, and I understand that you can do a lot of stuff without worrying about immutability getting in your way. But I do worry it might be a bit TOO hand holdy?
I’m not a Linux newbie, I know how to get dirty if I need to. I just want something nice and stable, to minimize the need to, if that makes sense 🤷♂️
But still, I’m not a guru, I’ve messed things up hard enough to need to reinstall before. Even though theoretically you shouldn’t need to do that🤷♂️
But I do worry it might be a bit TOO hand holdy?
There’s nothing you can’t do because of it. Bazzite specifically has rpm-ostree which means basically anything you can do on a non-immutable distro you can do on it. There’s no real downside. If you decide to get dirty and fuck up in a way you don’t know how to fix/don’t want to learn, you can rollback, on mint, you’ll have to reinstall.
You can still learn to do these things on bazzite, they just aren’t mandatory.
Funny you say that, I dual boot Bazzite and Mint, for gaming and everything else including programming, respectively.
Bazzite is a pain to install and use CLI applications in, but it’s got a great default setup for gaming!
In what way is it a pain? Because of the immutability? See that’s what I was worried about, but was assured that ostree could be used somehow? I still haven’t had time to look into it
I’ve found it needed a lot of extra steps, plus fidgeting with the OSTree defeats some of the safety/stability of it all. Bazzite, at least, recommends against using OSTree blindly as that’s meant for sysconfig and recommends using Homebrew instead, as this lives in your user space and touches very little; but even installing
libqalculategives memory issues. Most things I attempted to install did, actually. The Ruby interpreter installed just fine, and was the only CLI program that installed just fine IIRC.Now, I feel like it’s less of a hassle to Just Use Mint®, especially since I’ve got it installed anyway.
Hmmm yeah that doesn’t sound amazing… Thanks for the heads up
I am at 15 years and couldn’t agree more about having a distro with sane defaults. Mint is my 2nd choice behind Fedora.
I wish Fedora worked for me, something about it just doesn’t run right on my lappy and I like to have the same distro on all my machines so it’s a nogo across the board for me.
I like Fedora, it’s nice, it just absolutely won’t play nice with my macbook and I’m not gonna get a new laptop just for better Fedora support when this 14 year old hunk’o’junk still works perfectly with mint.
I just recently ditched Windows and installed Kubuntu. I like Ubuntu but wanted KDE Plasma, and that’s exactly what this is! Works great for me, including proton gaming with Steam.
My personal recommendations: Fedora KDE, Nobara or Linux Mint. You can’t go wrong with either one of them.
If I may ask, is there a rolling version of Fedora? I’ve never really used it.
Fedora is semi-rolling, it’s got fairly up-to date packages
Thanks for the recommendations! Lots of Fedora in here, I feel bad for never having checked it out.
Fedora kde spin here with 4080 super. 5 mins to set up the nvidia driver and steam, no issues for like 1-2 years
I’m really thinking I might go Fedora. I haven’t spun any of these up yet, busy busy.
My new laptop is a framework 13, AMD version. Apparently bluefin, which is Fedora based, is super compatible with all the features of that laptop.
I don’t know much about the other distros but Fedora is a happy medium between bleeding edge features in arch and waiting 10 years. It’s also one of the few distros that support HDR And HDR gaming
+1 to Nobara. Been using it for about a year and it’s pretty damn solid.
+1 for mint. I’ve been using pop, zorin and manjaro, but since I’ve used mint I completely switched to daily driving it on my personal devices and my gaming PC, even going so far that I got it installed on the company laptop 👍
I wanna new distro
One that won’t make me sick
One that won’t make me crash my PC
Or make me feel like a d**k
I want a new distro
One that won’t hurt my head
One that won’t make run CPU too high
Or make my NAS disks RED
One that won’t make me defrag
Watching squares of blue
One that makes me feel like I feel when I use UNIX too…
When I get to boooot you.What’s your GPU? Nvidia’s you will need to use the proprietary drivers, AMD it depends on how old it is but newer ones should be good with the default driver.
From the issues you mentioned on Ubuntu I think it’s likely you have an Nvidia since it doesn’t play completely nice with Wayland all of the time, which sucks because X11 is halfway out of the window.
Another thing I think you probably know but just in case, you can install different Desktop Environments on the same distro, no need to change distros for that. So you could install Plasma (and yes, Plasma is KDE) or Gnome on your existing mint installation.
Honestly I think Mint is great for beginners and if you’re happy with it there’s no reason to switch. One thing I always recommend though is keeping
/homein a separate partition so you can reinstall or switch distros without deleting your data.I entirely ditched Windows for good for about 1.5 year now (I’m new to Linux and have no prior experience with Linux before that) but for me it’s pretty smooth transition because I also ditched proprietary softwares and learn to use open source softwares, also stop play games that use kernel level anticheat
LMDE or plain Mint. Or just go for Debian.
Another vote for Mint! LMDE was on my radar too, thanks!
I’ve been pretty content with Fedora for a while.
I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Fedora in this thread. Never tried it, definitely gonna spin one up! Thanks!
Have fun!
Friggin love Fedora! ❤️
Probably my favorite distro for stability, package availability, and performance.
Also comes in tons of different spins if you like different desktop environments!
I use Mint for my main gaming PC, FWIW, totally rock solid
Honestly, Debian 12 bookworm with the KDE package is pretty damn solid. It’s all I need for my desktops.
Another vote for basic Debian. Thanks!
We’ve been on similar journeys. I started with Ubuntu Warty Warthog and happily remember all the desktop effects lost to time (emerald window decorations anybody?). I went through a Windows phase and settled back into Linux. My newest epoch is the age of self hosting and I’ve been learning a lot especially since the advent of Lemmy. I also play games, but I’ve been using a fully segregated Windows PC for that, though I’ve used Linux in the past.
The last time someone asked this question a lot of people said Mint packages are too out of date. I love Mint, I used Mint for several years, but the graphic driver stuff seems to depend on being very up to date. Someone else could probably explain it better than me. Perhaps it’s not relevant anymore, but I would look into it.
As for KDE, it’s really good now. I used to cling HARD to Gnome back in the old days and really disliked KDE, but things really got shaken up and KDE has been absurdly good for a few releases now. The steam deck even uses it. Also, a lot more distros seem to have releases for more than one desktop environment now. I guess what I’m trying to say is stuff you used to like may suck now and stuff that used to suck could be S-tier. Good luck getting back into Linux. Don’t get discouraged. It’s gotten a lot easier since old timers like us were hacking around on Ubuntu in the early 2000s.
Nice! I think my first Ubuntu was Feisty Fawn, though it may have been Edgy Eft. I definitely remember Feisty Fawn, but Edgy looks similar and I may have had it first 🤷♂️
At any rate, Hardy Heron was my daily driver, no windows backup, for at least a year at the time, probably more. I really gave it a go haha.
As to Mint being out of date, this is the first I’m hearing of it so thank you. Another commenter actually gave some more detail, so I think I’ll look into it a bit deeper.
Yeah I was the same way with KDE, tried it, never liked it, always liked gnome. But it’s interesting that kde has improved so much. I’m willing to try new things, so I guess we’ll see!
Thanks for the encouragement and the information!
