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 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.
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.
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!
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.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.
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!