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!
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
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🤷♂️
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!