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!
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
+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.
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
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.
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.
CachyOS is great for gaming but arch based
I use Mint for my main gaming PC, FWIW, totally rock solid
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
Cachyos works perfectly fine for me, it installs all the packages has a cachyos steam compatibility thing, just works for everything, had to install blender off the official site because the aur package has issues and had to grab those amd drivers seperately but thats about it
If you want immutable go bazzite, cachyos I initially dualbooted before erasing my whole drive and reinstalling because I didnt want to deal with windows ever again, piracy is harder, other than that everything I use works.
Thanks for the recommendations! I’ve gotten a lot for bazzite, and a few for CachyOS.
I’ll be honest bazzite is looking better and better, but with CachyOS at least I could say I use arch btw lol
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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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!
Welcome, enjoy!
Gnome with extensions like dock to panel and arcmenu (need those two at least but with them its pretty near perfect), or kde plasma are your best bet, plasmas almost too easily customizable I find myself messing with it a lot.
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!
LMDE or plain Mint. Or just go for Debian.
Another vote for Mint! LMDE was on my radar too, thanks!
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.They’re all basically the same dude. They’re all GNU/Linux. You have 2 main distros: Debian and Arch. Fedora is a kind of inbetween, there’s SUSE as well, but mostly it’s all Debian and Arch.
Mint, Ubuntu, etc … it’s all just Debian. Use Debian.You can use KDE plasma or Gnome or i3 or whatever you want.
Thanks for the insight!
When I run arch, I end up building pretty much exactly what fedora does. Once I realized this, I just install fedora now ;)
Easier to maintain, pretty dang current, “just works” like mint/ubuntu does. But I don’t do anything crazy though so it works for me.
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.
