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 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 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.
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 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?
LMDE is rock solid. I’ve been using it for a while and It Just Works.
That’s good to know!
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
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!
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!
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!
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!
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.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll check it out!
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.
Mints fine, but if you are looking for stability, gaming, and you don’t care too much for customization, I’d recommend Bazzite.
Bazzite has all gaming tweaks built in already (including device drivers) so things just work, you never have to use the command line unless you want to (I just had a BIOS update from the KDE Discover store where I get all my updates from).
I’ve always ran Ubuntu of some flavour in the past but would run into things eventually breaking or not working well. Coming up on the 2 year mark for Bazzite on my laptop.
Another poster talked about it being atomic? Almost immutable? Have you ran into problems with anything like that? Changes you’ve made getting reverted?
Not OP but I will add to the conversation from my own experience:
I have been using Bazzite for over a year now, and I haven’t seen any changes reverted, everything works perfectly fine just as the day I first installed it. It just works. It’s been very easy for me to migrate from Windows thanks to this distro. I distrohopped and tried every major distros (10+), most of my issues were either outdated GPU drivers or unstable OS for noobs like me. Bazzite fixes those issues.
The gist of it is that it’s the easiest distro I’ve ever used. Just go to bazzite.gg and try it.
- GUI apps: use the app store that ships with Bazzite (called Discover)
- CLI apps or libraries: use Hombrew (open terminal, type for example: brew install pandoc)
- if you can’t find what you want either in Discover or Homebrew, the developer might ship it in a portable format called Appimage, you can easily “install” it using the included Gear Lever app. Alternatively, you can install packages meant for pretty much any distro using Box Buddy (built on top of distrobox).
Bazzite is described as atomic but not fully immutable because of how it handles system updates while allowing user modifications.
Atomic Updates
- Transactional Updates: Bazzite uses rpm-ostree, which applies updates in a transactional manner. This means updates are downloaded and applied as a whole, and the system reboots into the updated version. If something goes wrong, it can roll back to the previous version.
- Layered Packages: Users can install additional software as an “overlay” on top of the base system without modifying the core image.
Not Fully Immutable
- Unlike some truly immutable OSes (e.g., Vanilla OS in “ABroot” mode or Ubuntu Core), Bazzite allows modifications:
- Users can install extra software using rpm-ostree install.
- The system has read-only root by default, but users can override this with rpm-ostree override replace or rpm-ostree reset.
- Flatpaks, AppImages, Distrobox and Homebrew, don’t affect the base OS. You can install and uninstall software to no avail and it won’t brick your OS installation.
Thus, Bazzite provides atomic updates via rpm-ostree, ensuring stability and rollback capability, but it remains modifiable, making it not strictly immutable.
+1 for Bazzite. It’s the non-distro that gave me the confidence to ditch Windows entirely last year after using Linux for work and occasional things for over a decade.
Thanks for the thorough write-up! That explains a lot!
I feel like bazzite might be taking the lead! Though I’m gonna check all of these out. Thanks!
CachyOS is great for gaming but arch based
Good to know thanks!
