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!
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.
Thanks for the recommendation! Nothing wrong with simple and standard. I won’t lie though, I fired up Fedora last night to play with, and I really liked what I saw 😅
I’m excited to go full Linux. It’s been a long time coming for me. Like I say, I tried to do it years ago. I recently did it for a year or more. I don’t remember switching back to Windows, it just kind of… Happened 🤷♂️
Mint Cinnamon has been great for me.
It is fully featured right out of the box and is a great drop-in replacement for windows. I will without a doubt use it when upgrading family members who are about to lose win10 support.
It is based off the popular Debian -> Ubuntu distros, and is very popular itself. This is good when it comes to quickly finding existing answers to specific questions. And of course they disabled the iffy stuff from ubuntu (snaps) while supporting flatpak.
I’m a software engineer who uses the command line all day, and I use Mint at work and at home. You see, even though the distro is a polished, full featured, and “easy” option, it is still Linux. So it is not locked down and you can still do what you want with your computer.
It won’t teach you to configure your system from the ground up like Arch might, instead it starts you off in a complete well-configured state and you can leave it alone or change it.
Thanks for the recommendation, and the explanation!
Thanks for tending to your replies so well!
😅
Fedora Atomic (Fedora Silverblue).
You can choose the KDE spin if you want.
Bazzite is Fedora Atomic but for a more gaming focus.
Bazzite was my first and was great and easy. If you don’t like the immutable aspect, check out Garuda.
Thanks! Lots of votes for bazzite. I’ve never tried it, but I plan to
I use Debian with XFCE, but while I love XFCE, it might not be everyone’s thing. If you do give it a try, make sure to use Whisker Menu instead of the default app menu, and also set keyboard mappings to your liking.
P.S: Ubuntu’s pushing for Snaps, not Flatpaks. Flatpaks are actually pretty good - makes it really easy to install a newer software version when the one in Debian repos doesn’t suffice.
Also, it’s not only Ubuntu pushing for Wayland - most distros or DEs either have it working or are working towards it (there are some exceptions). XFCE is still on xorg, but working on Wayland. The problem is xorg is on life support and not getting a lot of new features.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve used xfce in the past, and at least back then, it definitely wasn’t my jam. I appreciate how lightweight it is for older machines though!
And yeah I’ve definitely learned a lot through these discussions. Snap vs flatpaks, and the benefits of Wayland.
I’m leaving the op as is though, a record of things I didn’t know before haha
Pop OS!!
Just don’t try to install Steam…
i have Steam running without issues on Pop Os!
Just ditched windows about 2 weeks ago and finally made the full time switch to Manjaro and am absolutely loving it
Nice! Glad to hear it! I’ve heard mixed reviews on Manjaro
No issues so far (fingers crossed xD)
Mint is fine. Rather than changing distros, rather keep using it and configuring it the way you want it. For the most part, GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux and many popular distributions are largely the same.
I used Mint for a long time, I like it and Cinnamon. My laptop at home is running LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition), which is not based directly on Ubuntu like “normal” Linux Mint, and it works great.
I recently set up my desktop with Debian and KDE Plasma and think that will be my standard build moving forward. I have some home servers that are running Ubuntu and I was planning to rebuild with Debian anyways, so a Debian baseline across all my machines makes sense and should be easy to maintain.
I hadn’t realized mint was based on Ubuntu. But now that you mention it, I did notice flat packs in the software installer 🤔
Is LMDE stable?
There’s nothing wrong with flatpacks as far as I’m concerned. Ubuntu in the other hand is using snap instead - that one’s a bit fishy because the snap-store isn’t free.
I’m afraid I cannot help with LMDE as I use Mint/Cinnamon.
That’s fair, I think I was confusing flat packs with snaps.
Thanks
LMDE is rock solid. I’ve been using it for a while and It Just Works.
That’s good to know!
I didn’t have terminal transparency available OOTB, and it didn’t find my Nvidea GPU drivers, either.
Ubuntu-based Mint does, for me.
Another thing you might want to try is Mint with the Mate DE, which is based on old GNOME 2 code (and therefore can load the old add-ons like the 3D desktop cube etc)
Oh man, I do miss the cube. Are there modern versions of the cube? I don’t want to run outdated code, for the sake of stability
I’ve heard that KDE has a cube effect
I’ll have to look into this, thanks!
Well right now it’s just a throwaway install on a spare low power machine, so I can do anything really. But I see your point, thanks!
After trying out dozens of distros for years I didn’t want to deal with stability issues and troubleshoot odd problems anymore. I reinstalled Mint years almost 10 ago. Mint has gotten significantly better and more stable with each release since.
Now I only use 3 distros on a regular basis. Mint as a desktop OS, Raspberry Pi OS, and Debian (with Cinnamon) for a server running software that requires Debian for support. Debian was far more difficult to configure than Mint even on the new Dell laptop being used as a server.
I still try out other distros occasionally in VMs and using Live USBs, but still haven’t found anything that works as well on my hardware and for my needs as Mint.
A vote for Mint, good to know! Thanks!
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.
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
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.
That’s really good to know thanks, I guess I need to do some more research into how exactly it works. I’m not informed on rpm-ostree yet. But I’ll take your word for it, and take it into consideration!
Definitely leaning heavily towards bazzite right now.
Of course I’m gonna do my due diligence and at least test out most of these distros. But look and feel only get you so far, so I appreciate the input of what’s under the hood!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Thanks for the insight!
Mint is a great first choice, and you should be able to do lots with it, but there’s others you might want to at least be aware of, if gaming is important.
If you don’t care about customization at all, Bazzite (Fedora). While you can update typical things like panels, icon styles, window decorations, etc., making changes to things like SDDM requires a little bit more creativity.
That’s because it’s atomic (mostly immutable). You don’t have to worry about a bad update breaking your system, since you can just
rpm-ostree rollbackand get back to it. The downside is that atomic distros have a different way they’re designed, so learning how to work with them has a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s worth learning, imo.CachyOS (Arch). Kinda the hot thing right now. It’s Arch but oriented towards gaming, content creation, and optimized computing. You’ll have full customization abilities like a traditional distro, access to the AUR, and some really nice kernel and scheduler tweaking tools.
Pop!_OS Cosmic (Ubuntu). Pop!_OS has been a longtime popular choice, but they’re currently throwing all their effort into their brand new Cosmic desktop environment, so I’d wait until everything is at least in Beta. It looks great, though, and I think it’s going to set some new standards for user experiences.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Bazzite sounds interesting, but I’m not thrilled about it being immutable. I’ll have to research what atomic means exactly, but if it’s anything like steamos then I’m not sure I want the hassle for daily driving. I do want SOME customizability, in the sense that I don’t want some hard work tweak I’ve implemented being nuked by an update.
CachyOS sounds cool, but arch scares me. I tried a complicated arch install on my Chromebook, and ended up throwing in the towel. Not a standard install, but still a bad first experience regardless. I’ll still look into this though, thanks!
CosmicOS I might avoid just because I don’t need beta instability right now. But still, I think I’m gonna at least live environment all of these and check them out.
Thanks!
I do want SOME customizability, in the sense that I don’t want some hard work tweak I’ve implemented being nuked by an update.
Bazzite can do that. Unlike SteamOS, you cannot edit the system files, so there’s no customizations to wipe out. That said, user customizations generally live in
/varand/etc, and those are left intact during updates. They’re also the only directories that are mutable on purpose (/var/home/youruseris found there). You can also layer RPM files ordnfpackages usingrpm-ostree install. It’s a longer install process than traditional package managers, but it ensures you always have a restore point.As a sidenote, I do recommend also checking out
distrobox, as it’s a useful tool anywhere but especially on atomic systems.CachyOS sounds cool, but arch scares me.
Don’t be. Arch isn’t a big deal. The only reason people tend to like it is because vanilla Arch is a blank slate. That means the user gets to decide what goes into their system, but distros like CachyOS take all of that choice and decide what to include for you, in advance. So you get the same update schedule as the rest of Arch users, but you don’t have to think so hard about whether you want to use zfs or btrfs (for example).
If you want a great installation experience and mature community, I should also mention EndeavorOS. It’s Arch, but boy do they have the installation and onboarding down really well. If you’re nervous about CachyOS or Arch at all, check out this one.
CosmicOS I might avoid just because I don’t need beta instability right now.
Fair, and it’s not even in beta, it’s Alpha. I just mention it, because it’s going to be a big deal when it’s finished. Keep an eye on it.
Spin up some VMs and give em all a try!
Thanks for the information!
I was using popos regular LTS for about a year and always worked fine, no fuss getting nvidia drivers setup or anything.
I recently moved over to arch btw and using hyprland so its been pretty rough trying to get things working like I had on pop
Thanks!
Huh, I hadn’t heard of CachyOS. It seems like everyone went Arch>Manjaro>EndeavorOS. It looks good from the screenshots and I like seeing my favorite DE/WMs in there. If I don’t know what any of those acronyms and technical terms on their page mean, would I still get something out of it? I’m about due for my every-few-months wipe and reinstall.
I don’t know what any of that means, either. I think real world increases in performance are something like 10% for general computing, but it’s negligible for gaming.
The only thing that’s distinctly different from EndeavorOS is they have their own repos for optimized packages and their own helper interface for changing kernels, adding common packages, getting drivers, etc.
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!
I was about to say that you should learn the “ins and outs” of Linux first before choosing a distro until I’ve noticed these part(s) of your post.
I’ve been toying with Linux on and off for almost 20 years now.
I’m comfortable in the command line
20 years is more than enough time for a user to use Linux properly. And with that in mind, well… you are overthinking it – just go with whatever you want, really.
That’s fair, yeah. I just haven’t been active or paying attention to what’s new and hot, or what’s stable and safe, or what’s stagnated. Just want some ideas, direction to go in. There’s a million options.
I’ve gotten some pretty good suggestions thus far. Thanks!
I use Mint for my main gaming PC, FWIW, totally rock solid
Good to know!
