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!
Mint is great as long as you don’t care about HDR or Wayland. Seeing as you don’t want Arch and Ubuntu is being a pain in the ass for you I’d say give Debian Testing a try. It has the newest packages unlike standard Debian. You can choose KDE, Cinnamon, or something else. I hear people constantly reccommending OpenSuse but I’ve never tried it so I can’t comment. If you just want to game and don’t care about much else then Bazzite is pretty great. Nobara is also popular. PopOS kind of sucks in my experience, I’d avoid it unless you know you’d like it.
Edit: Forgot to clarify HDR support requires KDE Plasma or GNOME. Plasma has better support for it right now.
I recently made the switch from Windows to Linux on my gaming desktop and it’s been a nearly flawless transition. I’ve been running Pop_OS without problems. If you have an AMD video card you might want to check Bazzite for a gaming oriented Linux distro. Any distro should allow you to use a different desktop, so which GUI to use is up to you. KDE Plasma has a lot of skins to choose from and is a pretty easy transition from Windows. You don’t even have to stick with a single desktop environment. I currently choose between the default Pop_OS or Plasma depending on my mood or use case.
Thanks for the recommendation!
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.
Same here. Coming from Windows, Kubuntu seems like a good choice for me (though I might change one day).
Thanks for the input! Glad it’s working for you!
There are some great recommendations on this thread, I’m excited to try them out!
never could get away from Windows entirely. Especially for gaming, and a few critical apps.
Been gaming exclusively on Linux now for few years, including in VR. Just few hours ago before my work day I was playing Elden Ring with controller. 0 tinkering, System key, “EL”[ENTER] then play. So… unless you need kernel level anti-cheat, Linux is pretty good for gaming nowadays.
Same of the few “critical” apps, I don’t know what these are but rare are the ones without equivalent and/or that don’t work with Wine, sometimes even better that on Windows.
Anyway : Debian. Plain and simple, not BS with a mix bag of installers (but you can still use AppImage or
amor evennixwhenever you want to). It just works and keep on working.Yeah I’ve been using a steam deck since it’s release, Linux gaming is definitely a million times better than days of yore.
Thanks for the Debian recommendation! Not a bad idea.
I also have a SteamDeck and it’s IMHO one of the best device to promote Linux. Just hand skeptic the device, let them play and ask them how the experience then if they can guess the OS.
Yeah honestly, I set up a Windows SD card for dual booting, and I’ve used it maybe once. SteamOS is where it’s at for the steam deck. Premium.
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.
+1 to Nobara. Been using it for about a year and it’s pretty damn solid.
Thanks for the recommendations! Lots of Fedora in here, I feel bad for never having checked it out.
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.
I also like that Mint comes with an Office suite and Timeshift pre-installed.
Timeshift is a life saver but its still experimenting in the dark. Id rather not spend my life tinkering all the time. Office suite is an app & 1 word in a config.
Mint is great for non technical people, but if you have the skill and crave more the innovation that nix introduced is singular.
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!
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
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!
+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 👍
Nice! Thanks for the recommendation!
A bit late to the party here. These are my two cents based on my own experiences
Mint:
I’m currently running Mint on my work laptop. It’s rock solid, never had any problems. Apt is good, Flatpak and Brew had everything else I needed. I love Cinnamon and I like that minimal tinkering is needed.
Bazzite:
I have a big gaming laptop running Bazzite. I mostly use it to stream games to my shitty small laptop to have a poor-man’s Steam Deck. I am really impressed! Everything was just setup and working out of the box. I like the immutable concept. Everything is running in Flatpak and Brew. I can add Distrobox if anything else is needed. And rpm-ostree if I really need a program running “on the system”. Haven’t bothered tinkering with anything (other than changing wallpaper) because I liked it out of the box. One problem is documentation. There’s just so much documentation written for non-immutable distros which won’t work, since immutable distros works differently.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed:
I have a small 11" Chromebook with touch screen. ChromeOS was EOL on it, and Tumbleweed and Arch were the only viable option. Went with Tumbleweed just to check it out. I’m not impressed. I hate the package manager, and the settings are all over the place. I don’t really see the appeal and I much prefer EndeavourOS. With that said, it works. So I haven’t bother changing distro. Everyone seems to love it, but I don’t get the hype. Probably a me-problem.
EndeavourOS
It’s baby’s first Arch. It’s just Arch with sane defaults and everything set up for you. I love aur and I love that any program you may think of is just running on Arch. Endless possibilities for tinkering. I loved it, but not currently running it. I do wish I had it on my Chromebook but I haven’t bothered with the jump. I have broken it a couple of times. 100% my fault messing around with stuff I shouldn’t have messed with. But it was never that hard to fix. And the wiki is AMAZING! If you don’t do stupid shit, there won’t be a problem.
Debian
Running it on my home server. Rock solid stuff. Great for running a server that doesn’t require bleeding edge and which is just super solid and extremely well documented.
Manjaro:
Stay the fuck away from that stupid shit distro. It almost bricked my laptop and required tons of work to get back up and running. They do stupid shit and the way they hold back packages is just stupid. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Just go with EndeavourOS or Geruda or something.
Ubuntu
No. Just run Mint
NixOS
Really really cool, but you need a bachelor’s in Linux and a lot of time to really reap the benefits of it. Shit documentation.
Thanks for the breakdown! Bookmarking this.
Ymmv though. Everyone seems to love Tumbleweed except me, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
These are just the distros I have experience using. I have also distro jumped a lot, so I’ve tried a bunch more than these, but not enough to have a very good opinion about them
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.To streamline my request for help, I omitted some details, and combined some of my experiences.
My desktop has a 3060ti in it, but I haven’t actually run Linux on that lately, besides some live environments.
Most of my testing has been on a few year old thinkcenter with integrated graphics, Intel CPU. That’s where I was having problems with jittering and mouse capture. Actually that’s still installed, but it’s doing server things so I’m disinclined to mess with it at the moment.
I have an older PC, again with integrated graphics, that I’ve installed Mint on and have been playing with it.
Ultimately I plan to more or less replace my desktop with a new framework 13 I’ve got in the mail. That has an AMD iGPU.
I kind of disregarded the idea of DE swapping, because I did it in the past and screwed stuff up. Maybe it’s easier these days?
Thanks for the /home suggestion!
I’m tossing in another vote for Fedora. It’s honestly about the closest you’ll get to “Standard Linux”.
It’s one of the most bleeding-edge distros while still being very stable and secure (Rolling Releases are more up-to-date but I’ve had enough issues with them). Traditionally a Gnome-First Distro but the word is that the next release will promote KDE alongside Gnome (That said KDE is already great on it).
Crazy, I can’t believe I’ve never looked into Fedora before. Lots of love for it here. I’ll try it out! Thanks!
Fedora gang! 🤝
I settled on Manjaro over the past year but since arch isn’t in consideration, I’d vote fedora or a derivative like bazzite due to its additions for gaming.
Arch is in the running, I guess, I just didn’t know what I wanted and had a bad experience with arch. But it’s been explained that while arch CAN be highly customized, it can also be very stable on a pre-customized distro.
Thanks for the input! Manjaro is on the list to try out!
Debian’s pretty good, or if you need something a bit newer, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed seems pretty good as well in terms of a beginner’s distro.
Thanks!
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!
