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!

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    4·
    20 hours ago

    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 /home in a separate partition so you can reinstall or switch distros without deleting your data.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      15 hours ago

      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!