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!
Fedora Atomic (Fedora Silverblue).
You can choose the KDE spin if you want.
Bazzite is Fedora Atomic but for a more gaming focus.
Bazzite was my first and was great and easy. If you don’t like the immutable aspect, check out Garuda.
Thanks! Lots of votes for bazzite. I’ve never tried it, but I plan to
CachyOS is great for gaming but arch based
Good to know thanks!
Gnome with extensions like dock to panel and arcmenu (need those two at least but with them its pretty near perfect), or kde plasma are your best bet, plasmas almost too easily customizable I find myself messing with it a lot.
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?
Another thing you might want to try is Mint with the Mate DE, which is based on old GNOME 2 code (and therefore can load the old add-ons like the 3D desktop cube etc)
Oh man, I do miss the cube. Are there modern versions of the cube? I don’t want to run outdated code, for the sake of stability
I’ve heard that KDE has a cube effect
I’ll have to look into this, thanks!
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
LMDE is rock solid. I’ve been using it for a while and It Just Works.
I didn’t have terminal transparency available OOTB, and it didn’t find my Nvidea GPU drivers, either.
Ubuntu-based Mint does, for me.
That’s good to know!
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!
Honestly, Debian 12 bookworm with the KDE package is pretty damn solid. It’s all I need for my desktops.
Another vote for basic Debian. Thanks!
I just recently ditched Windows and installed Kubuntu. I like Ubuntu but wanted KDE Plasma, and that’s exactly what this is! Works great for me, including proton gaming with Steam.
Same here. Coming from Windows, Kubuntu seems like a good choice for me (though I might change one day).
Thanks for the input! Glad it’s working for you!
There are some great recommendations on this thread, I’m excited to try them out!
I’ve been pretty content with Fedora for a while.
I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Fedora in this thread. Never tried it, definitely gonna spin one up! Thanks!
Have fun!
Friggin love Fedora! ❤️
Probably my favorite distro for stability, package availability, and performance.
Also comes in tons of different spins if you like different desktop environments!
I’m tossing in another vote for Fedora. It’s honestly about the closest you’ll get to “Standard Linux”.
It’s one of the most bleeding-edge distros while still being very stable and secure (Rolling Releases are more up-to-date but I’ve had enough issues with them). Traditionally a Gnome-First Distro but the word is that the next release will promote KDE alongside Gnome (That said KDE is already great on it).
Fedora gang! 🤝
Crazy, I can’t believe I’ve never looked into Fedora before. Lots of love for it here. I’ll try it out! 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!
Debian with XFCE here - I do just have a single monitor though so I suppose I’m not running into complicated display issues anytime soon. It has been extremely solid, I forget to update my system for months on end and then remember to do it one day and it just works. XFCE is boring like Debian but that’s why I like it: it stays out of my way.
I work on RHEL at my day job so Linux isn’t just a hobby for me, and I love being free from Windows. Honestly the only thing I keep a windows VM around for is an installation of Adobe Acrobat PDF reader because I’m too lazy to set up signatures on Linux since I don’t sign that many documents anyway. And maybe a couple of windows servers from a few keys I’ve got lying around to learn AD on.
We’ve been on similar journeys. I started with Ubuntu Warty Warthog and happily remember all the desktop effects lost to time (emerald window decorations anybody?). I went through a Windows phase and settled back into Linux. My newest epoch is the age of self hosting and I’ve been learning a lot especially since the advent of Lemmy. I also play games, but I’ve been using a fully segregated Windows PC for that, though I’ve used Linux in the past.
The last time someone asked this question a lot of people said Mint packages are too out of date. I love Mint, I used Mint for several years, but the graphic driver stuff seems to depend on being very up to date. Someone else could probably explain it better than me. Perhaps it’s not relevant anymore, but I would look into it.
As for KDE, it’s really good now. I used to cling HARD to Gnome back in the old days and really disliked KDE, but things really got shaken up and KDE has been absurdly good for a few releases now. The steam deck even uses it. Also, a lot more distros seem to have releases for more than one desktop environment now. I guess what I’m trying to say is stuff you used to like may suck now and stuff that used to suck could be S-tier. Good luck getting back into Linux. Don’t get discouraged. It’s gotten a lot easier since old timers like us were hacking around on Ubuntu in the early 2000s.
Nice! I think my first Ubuntu was Feisty Fawn, though it may have been Edgy Eft. I definitely remember Feisty Fawn, but Edgy looks similar and I may have had it first 🤷♂️
At any rate, Hardy Heron was my daily driver, no windows backup, for at least a year at the time, probably more. I really gave it a go haha.
As to Mint being out of date, this is the first I’m hearing of it so thank you. Another commenter actually gave some more detail, so I think I’ll look into it a bit deeper.
Yeah I was the same way with KDE, tried it, never liked it, always liked gnome. But it’s interesting that kde has improved so much. I’m willing to try new things, so I guess we’ll see!
Thanks for the encouragement and the information!
My personal recommendations: Fedora KDE, Nobara or Linux Mint. You can’t go wrong with either one of them.
If I may ask, is there a rolling version of Fedora? I’ve never really used it.
Fedora is semi-rolling, it’s got fairly up-to date packages
+1 to Nobara. Been using it for about a year and it’s pretty damn solid.
Thanks for the recommendations! Lots of Fedora in here, I feel bad for never having checked it out.
Fedora kde spin here with 4080 super. 5 mins to set up the nvidia driver and steam, no issues for like 1-2 years
I’m really thinking I might go Fedora. I haven’t spun any of these up yet, busy busy.
My new laptop is a framework 13, AMD version. Apparently bluefin, which is Fedora based, is super compatible with all the features of that laptop.
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.
I am at 15 years and couldn’t agree more about having a distro with sane defaults. Mint is my 2nd choice behind Fedora.
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
I’ve found it needed a lot of extra steps, plus fidgeting with the OSTree defeats some of the safety/stability of it all. Bazzite, at least, recommends against using OSTree blindly as that’s meant for sysconfig and recommends using Homebrew instead, as this lives in your user space and touches very little; but even installing
libqalculategives memory issues. Most things I attempted to install did, actually. The Ruby interpreter installed just fine, and was the only CLI program that installed just fine IIRC.Now, I feel like it’s less of a hassle to Just Use Mint®, especially since I’ve got it installed anyway.
Hmmm yeah that doesn’t sound amazing… Thanks for the heads up
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🤷♂️
But I do worry it might be a bit TOO hand holdy?
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!
Pop OS!!
Just don’t try to install Steam…
i have Steam running without issues on Pop Os!
I use Debian with XFCE, but while I love XFCE, it might not be everyone’s thing. If you do give it a try, make sure to use Whisker Menu instead of the default app menu, and also set keyboard mappings to your liking.
P.S: Ubuntu’s pushing for Snaps, not Flatpaks. Flatpaks are actually pretty good - makes it really easy to install a newer software version when the one in Debian repos doesn’t suffice.
Also, it’s not only Ubuntu pushing for Wayland - most distros or DEs either have it working or are working towards it (there are some exceptions). XFCE is still on xorg, but working on Wayland. The problem is xorg is on life support and not getting a lot of new features.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve used xfce in the past, and at least back then, it definitely wasn’t my jam. I appreciate how lightweight it is for older machines though!
And yeah I’ve definitely learned a lot through these discussions. Snap vs flatpaks, and the benefits of Wayland.
I’m leaving the op as is though, a record of things I didn’t know before haha
