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!
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!
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
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!
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!
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 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.
Noted! Thanks!
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 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
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!
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.
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!
😅
Similar story here. Tried some latest versions of popular distros. Settled with Fedora KDE. Fedora supported nearly everything in my convertible laptop out of the box where others were hit and miss. Easy transition from Windows 10. KDE doesn’t enforce it’s own opinions of desktop and workflow like Gnome does. Steam, Epic and GoG all play fine. It’s my daily driver now. Much recommended.
I’m considering transition from Windows like OP, tried Ubuntu desktop first, since I have some experience with server version, and for some reason it kept crashing on me, then I tried fedora workstation and it works reliable, so I’m planning to stick with it. NVidia card, Ryzen 3700, plenty of RAM machine.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll check it out!
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.
Thanks! HDR isn’t important to me right now. Though I think I need to specify that I’ll be installing this on a framework laptop, and therefore, from what I’ve learned recently, Wayland is actually preferred because it enables some track pad gestures that x11 lacks somehow.
I’m definitely leaning towards bazzite, because people seem to think it’s not that bad even for general use, and it ticks a lot of boxes.
Though nixOS is on the table. I at least wanna try my hand at configuring it.
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!
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If I may ask, is there a rolling version of Fedora? I’ve never really used it.
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+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
Thanks! I’m actually settling into bluefin right now. It’s based on Fedora, but is closer to bazzite. Supposedly has great framework support, which is important I realized
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!
