I always suggest Mint Edge edition, that has a newer kernel, not the default Mint. But I still suggest Mint, because simply, it’s more user friendly than any of the other ones. It has gui panels for almost everything.
Anybody that already has had a computer for 2 years and is coming from Windows will have almost no problems with Mint. Stability is top priority for first time Linux users and you need some visual guide with screenshots. Mint also has a great default look and setup for people coming from Windows. Mint is probably the best distro to put on your mom’s old laptop that is “getting slow” because of viruses.
I’d recommend KDE Neon or Ubuntu also depending on the situation but if I don’t know anything about the person and computer I’d say Mint.
I have no idea what this challenge is (I automatically assume it’s some cringe when I read “challenge” also that pic is… what?), but you don’t run Mint/Debian/Ubuntu if you have super-fresh hardware, like AMD 7000-series or Intel 14th gen and so on. in that case you have to go with Fedora or one of its derivatives (Nobara, Bazzite, etc.), because they have the newest kernels that allow this hardware to run OOB.
if you have a bit older hardware (like 2-3 years old), Mint or Debian is your best bet; Ubuntu if you have to, and only as a stepping stone. it’s a solid base and if you use flatpak for everything (Firefox, Chrome, Lutris, Steam, etc.) you won’t have issues with old packages and you’ll get the best of both worlds - stability and supported hardware.
I think it started with Linus and Luke of Linus Tech Tips doing a 30 day linux challenge to see what it’s like daily driving linix. Jeff of Craft Computing did one recently as well.
Linus uninstalled his desktop after ignoring the warning that said °hey, this will uninstall your desktop.°
Which is his fault, but also this would never happen on Windows. The power and lack of hand-holding of Linux is a great advantage for power users, but with great power comes great responsibility, and many people don’t need the responsibility.
For sure, which is why I only use Mint anyway. I need my hand held. But Linus was doing power-user things without power-user reading. You can’t really claim the car is no good when you opened the hood and started swapping hoses without checking to see what goes where.
Yeah, I feel like Linux needs the equivalent of Administrator accounts on Windows. Root is the equivalent of the System account on Windows, something even power users might never encounter, because it’s a level of power you shouldn’t ever need.
We need users to have permission to install software and do other administrative tasks, without having permission to do very destructive actions like uninstalling core system packages. Aunt Flo should be able to install Mahjong from her distros package manager GUI, without needing dangerous root access.
Well, no, not exactly. Most accounts on desktop linux distros are admin accounts. The way I would define that is whether or not the user has sudo permissions, either by being in the sudo group or sudoers file. Some distros do ask if you want the user to be admin. And that’s pretty analagous to being admin on windows and getting a UAC prompt for an elevated process.
Yeah, but there is no separation between being able to do day to day administrative actions like installing software, and being able to do destructive actions no one should need to do unless in exceptional circumstances.
Mint has user-friendly tools that are much better than Fedora’s lack of tools and openSUSE’s YAST for beginners.
wait Mint was (and still is) out of date?
The kernel is too old for newer AMD gpu drivers to work, but switching to a newer kernel isn’t too hard. I had to when I built a new computer last winter, but I have also used various *nixes for a good long time.
Knowing how to discover you need a newer kernel is a bit tough for recent convert, though.
I wouldn’t call switching kernels that hard. It takes a few clicks and a reboot to do. However, they kicker is that you need to know to do that. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Exactly. As far as Linux has come in terms of ease of desktop use and hardware compatibility, there is still a barrier in knowing how to know which flavor is right for you and, almost more importantly, why that flavor is right.
Idk I never really liked mint it seemed too ui polished without much back end polish.
For some reason its the goto for noobs maybe since it comes with a desktop already bundled with no extra config needed usually. But theres so many distros that have that now as well as up to date packages.
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I don’t know the difference between Wayland and X11, all I know is that they’re options, and I’m 30 days into the Arch-derived(is that the right term?) Garuda Linux that defaults Wayland with a 3080 and I haven’t had any problems? Aren’t the Mint problems that it’s a stable distro with outdated stuff?
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Stable has nothing to do with outdated packages.
That’s a personal decision by a distro.
Fedora is a stable distro because generally the packages stay on the same major version throughout the version, however they have a list of exceptions for certain applications that should be updated for security or perhaps they don’t follow a major/minor/bugfix release and it’s bad practice to hack together your own versions.
Fedora rebases it’s packages every 6 months, so it’s never left far behind.
I see! Thank you for the explanation, I’m still very new as this is my first Linux and I did no planning or intentional research before swapping over, I just got mad at Windows and was formatting my main dive 15 minutes later. I avoided Mint specifically because I’d seen lemmy threads saying it was using old packages on purpose for stability reasons, and that for actual gaming I’d want rolling release?
It all depends on what you actually want to do.
I have a computer connected to the TV with Chimera installed because that’s SteamOS 3 with emulators preconfigured and is completely couch + controller friendly.
My laptop has Fedora because it’s up to date, but everything is tested before release, and all upgrade paths are automated unlike Arch which burnt me in the past with breaking changes.
On my Pi’s I have Diet Pi, which is Debian but has images for each of the different ARM boards and has a bunch of scripts for setting up print servers, Home Assistant, etc. I want Debian for it’s slow unchanging nature there.
On my desktop, less so.
But underneath they are all Linux, and they all behave in very similar ways, it’s all about the initial setup.
I’ve tried a few distro’s recently. Pop os, mint, and nobara. Mint was pretty bad (i really wanted it not to be), nobara was good but had issues with sleep and after a month my sound quit working. Pop OS has been flawless and I love that I can set the workspaces hot key to the windows key.
Arch is actually reasonable as the foundation of an easy to use Linux OS, provided you don’t care about stability. It’s up to date with all the latest stuff, has support for many apps and packages without having to add extra repos, and it has fantastic documentation. All that’s really missing is the GUI installer and stuff to help newbies. Projects like EndeavorOS and Garuda provide that.
If you actually need stability though, which lots of new users would appreciate, use Fedora or a derivative like Nobara or Universal Blue.
I daily drive Nvidia plus Optimus with wayland, but it’s easy enough to switch back to X11 just using a menu on the login screen.
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How are you managing to break Linux OSes so much?
Because Fedora is open source only to the point of it being pathological. If there isn’t am open source driver most time you’re just boned. Someone new is going to have a tough time with it, and the community is on average a very “lol rtfm” bunch. Not as bad as Arch, but that’s not saying much.
Meanwhile, despite the problems around Ubuntu, Debian communities are much more understanding and helpful. Mint even with old packages is going to be an easier time for a newbie. Certainly a newbie unfamiliar with the way entirely too much of the FOSS community is.
To be fair arch has amazing docs, and even a rube like me can follow it decently well. I found endeavor to be the easiest distro to use. But agreed the attitude isn’t great.
Ah, OpenSuse. The distro with the package management that spams your drive full of unnecessary optional dependencies.
Would always recommend EndeavourOS.
Sadly true. When I installed texlive-base it tried to install like 300 recommended packages, I almost accepted D:
I’d still recommend it, I don’t know if you can change the default for recommended packages because aside from that, I actually love it.
Yesss! My first five minutes with OpenSuse.
I mean, you can change that behaviour somehow. But there are so many other small things like the constant vendor changes. Zypper is just so quirky. It’s a cool distro and to have a rolling release option like tumbleweed is always a big plus in my opinion, but I just wouldn’t recommend it to people who are not really eager to play around with their distro.
What I find weird about Tumbleweed is, that updating is not integrated into YaST or another UI. You have to use the commandline to keep your system up to date. That makes it exactly as inconvenient as Arch for newcomers, but Arch has a whole philosophy behind this while SuSE is typically very GUI oriented. It’s weird.
With KDE Plasma it lets me update from its store, even though it’s kind of annoying because I like to do it from the CLI and it blocks Zypper when checking for available updates.
Tried it once and literally could not get nvidia drivers to install. Went straight back to endeavouros and continued to enjoy
Maybe you should have clicked on ‘nvidia repository’ in Yast. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Except that didn’t work
because redhat smelly.
Also fedora is hella configured out of the box, which is nice for new users, and a good reason to just use it. But at that point i think you should just use something like debian while figuring out how to properly do the whole linux thing because it’s going to positively benefit you quite a bit.
Which is why I ask people one simple question: do they plan to game. If they plan to game, I don’t recommend them Mint. If they aren’t, I recommend them Mint.
For me, the systems I’ve installed Mint on for people, haven’t had any problems at this current time. While I have never had an issue using Fedora myself(never been interested enough in OpenSUSE to keep with it when I’ve tried it), I’ll never recommend Fedora in similar cases where I’ve installed Mint. The machines were older and the users aren’t Linux enthusiasts. They just want a working machine to do basic tasks without breaking their bank to get a new machine when their Windows OS reached EOL.
However I can’t confirm or explain why the people you say that are doing this challenge are having problems. I don’t know their hardware specs and I don’t know them so I don’t know what they know about Linux.
(Please note, to all Mint users, I’m not saying Mint is only for non-Linux enthusiasts. I love how Mint is good for the non-enthusiasts and enthusiasts alike).
If you have cutting edge hardware, this might be an issue. But most people don’t and for them Mint will work just fine. If you want cutting edge, don’t use Mint. But that’s not their focus at all. Mint is for people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.
If you want cutting edge, don’t use Mint. But that’s not their focus at all. Mint is for people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.
These don’t seem like competing needs. When I think “just work with minimal hassle”, I don’t think “I need to restrict myself to outdated hardware”.
I’m perfectly happy running old packages in general. I’m still on Plasma 5, and it works just as well as it did last year. But that’s a matter of features, not compatibility. Old is fine; broken is not.
I think Mint is mostly for the “I have a PC that’s a few years old and want something easy and reliable to replace Windows with” crowd. Because it works great for that. It’s the perfect beginner distro.
Yeah absolutely zero newbies are going to buy a new computer in order to test out Linux.
If you have cutting edge hardware, this might be an issue.
No, thanks to Valve’s efforts for Steam Deck all RDNA2 hardware directly benefits for upstreamed improvements.
The thing is that Linux has gone mainstream, with young adults and teens trying it out for Gaming and Streaming. The target people has changed so recommending Mint is not suitable anymore.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say it’s gone “mainstream” since you still have to be moderately nerdy to know about it. I get your point though. This is one of the reasons I am so happy the Steam Deck exists. Before Valve released the Steam Deck nobody wanted to make games for Linux, so Valve said “fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves” and proved it was not only possible, but a better experience overall. While not all games work, having 78-80% of your game library work on Linux, with no Windows OS performance tax, is a great experience. Even with the Proton compatibility layer games generally run faster than on Windows.
this video from last month has 600k views. Ive seen several recent linux videos with 150k+ views. Brodie, Horn and the Linux Experience constantly pull 50k to 200K views on some of their videos.
You don’t have to run linux to watch a video about linux.
It mean to say its not an obscure thing anymore, Id say its becoming mainstream.
Not even close to approaching mainstream!
It’a close. Isn’t it at 4% market share? That’s higher than Firefox.
If you have cutting edge hardware
If you have cutting edge hardware, you would probably need linux-next kernel. Otherwise you don’t have cutting edge hardware.
The machine I have running mint is a fifteen year old Core 2 Duo T6600 laptop. Works great!
I do want to add that new games can also require new packages, the way Alan Wake II did at launch. Even on Arch you had to compile the development version of Mesa for it to run.
people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.
Elementary OS. Hassle-free, elegant and polished, distraction-free.
I’d give it a shot if i was on the lookout for something new, but I see absolutely no reason to switch from Mint.
Yeah there’s no need to change if you’re content with what you’re using.
Any distro will “just work” if used correctly…
If you have to tiptoe around to use it “correctly”, it doesn’t “just work”
I never said anything about “tiptoeing around”, but what you said here is correct…
Mint works. Most alternatives don’t. I can install Mint on a total newbie’s system, and not have to worry about something breaking two weeks later. Hell, most newbies can install Mint if you give them the USB.
On a deeper level, I think Mint devs are one of the few teams that understand the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ philosophy.
Isn’t red hat enough reason to not use fedora?
Red hat I can live with. The problem is IBM.
No, for one Red hat has every incentive to support Fedora. Also Fedora does its own thing separate from Red hat. Red hat does have some control but the community elects leadership and the elected leaders are what control the project direction. Also Fedora has a lot of volunteer package maintainers that would stop working if there was a hostile take over.
Notice that the community has left Ubuntu which used to be the community go to. They no longer have a large community working on projects and maintaining software.
thanks for the clarification. I just recently got into linux and don’t know much, but as i was researching Fedora, that’s what i came across. Which is a pretty big turn off for a newcomer migrating from windows and wanting to get away from big corporations.
Not really. Fedora is community run.
The short answer is no, most people are not bothered at all by RHEL’s source situation or IBM as a company.
