The biggest issue for most casual users starting remains picking a distro, and to that end I think we as a Linux community need to stop recommending flavors of the month. Even Bazzite has come up against some recent drama and having to break down distro drama for a new users is an absolute deal breaker.
Based on their skill level and needs just get them into a bucket: Mint, Fedora, or Arch. They’ve been around forever, they’re stable, there’s plentiful documentation and there are no weird opinionated decisions buried in them that’ll go off like a landmine or confound troubleshooting. Install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, I’ve had less issues with those (until recently I dunno, we can revisit this point) but overall just everything simple and smooth for a transition.
Once people are on Linux they can start to come up with their own informed opinions depending on how well they take to the environment but at the same time there’s nothing wrong with starting and ending with the above distros.
(I actually don’t know much about Fedora, there might be a slightly better variant recommendation but it’s gotta be something analogous to Mint. I’m pretty adamant on vanilla Arch though, if that’s the route you want to go. Anyone who starts with Arch will be able to better determine an Arch variant down the road for themselves and are also more likely to do multiple installs. Doing so much as even a single reinstall may be a deal breaker for casuals).
100% agree, and made pretty much the same point in the LTT forum a while back. Flavor of the month people annoy tf out of me, I’ve been a linux user for over a decade and have never even thought of recommending something outside of the big 3 (debian/ubuntu (or mint if that’s your thing), fedora, arch)
Tried and true distros are the only real option and IMO the difference between distros once everything is configured is mininal
we as a Linux community need to stop recommending flavors of the month.
That’s not my experience of what happens. In fact I think it’s a problem that 95% of the suggestions I see are for Mint, and, unpopular opinion, I actually think Mint kinda sucks.
I think at this point Mint is a brilliant option for mom or Dad’s laptop that’s still on Windows 10 and Microsoft deemed “too insecure” for Windows 11, but Bazzite and other newer Distros do so much better at being distros for gamers right out of the box that those are better to recommend to gamers
Yeah, may have been. I haven’t been following many distros too closely until the past ~2-3 years.
After thinking some more on this, I think it may actually be preferable to suggest “flavor of the week” distros as long as they have a well supported base distro. In fact, I just thought about something a graphic designer coworker brought up a while back – he had been looking into Linux and had been hearing good things about a distro I still haven’t heard of anywhere but from him. It does kinda look decent: https://getaurora.dev/en/. Given that its base is immutable: Universal Blue, it seems like a solid choice for someone like him, as long as he can run a few graphic-y apps he might wanna use, like Krita and Inkscape, maybe Gimp. I think folks who are younger than me, like this coworker, are more open to picking up new tools instead of just clinging to Adobe garbage no matter what, and that’s a really good thing for the FOSS ecosystem as a whole! May be a good idea to let folks like that have a distro more catered to their aesthetic sensibilities. The base distro matters most for sure.
Yeah, I think that’s the thought process. And I’m not sure regarding the kernel version, but imo that’s the most important thing to stay relatively up to date on.
I had different results. I work in IT and understand the comprehension levels of the average user. The top result was a distribution where the Wikipedia was in Portuguese. No update in 5 years. https://distrochooser.de/en/d5cf19cdf504/
Mmm, this is kind of what I’m talking about. I’m certainly not knocking Nobara as a distro or people who prefer it, but taken from their FAQ,
Will there ever be other Desktop Environment versions?
No. The ‘Official’ modified KDE release layout was designed for myself and my father out of personal preference.
I heard Nobara breaks SELinux, is this true?
No. We have completely swapped SELinux in favor of AppArmor (this is what Ubuntu and OpenSUSE use).
Is Nobara compatible with SecureBoot?
No. Nobara ships with a kernel that has been custom patched and is built and hosted on COPR.
Can I upgrade from Fedora to Nobara using the Nobara repositories?
NO. This is a big large huge NO. The Nobara install ISOs have a ton of packages that get installed which are specific to Nobara, and not installed on Fedora on fresh install.
Just how modified is Nobara aside from what I can see?
Heavily.
This project is quite new, is it going anywhere? Is there anything to say it won’t just up stop development? Is it something that is recommendable to daily drive? (I am quite technical, and can troubleshoot my issues).
As long as I am alive and using linux this project will continue. It started because I needed something both myself and my father could easily use from clean install without time consuming troubleshooting or extra package and repo installation.
It’s been around since ~2022 compared to Mint in ~2006
These are exactly the kind of points that a casual, new user would stumble across and in attempting to troubleshoot things from a Fedora perspective could trip them up severely.
My point is that casual users are already averse to making the switch and they are likely going to do ONE install and it needs to be as vanilla and stable as possible. If they turn into Linux nerds who want to distro hop later, they’ll find their way, but we need to keep things absolutely stock and simple.
It’s been around since ~2022 compared to Mint in ~2006
A distro that’s been around for 3-4 years is plenty of time to be up and running. Bazzite runs great and has been around a similar amount of time.
Another thing that people don’t factor in: documentation gets outdated. When I was trying to set up my Ubuntu server, a lot of documentation on what I needed was 11-12 years old, and the syntax has changed since then. For newbies, this may as well just be “figure it out yourself”.
The biggest issue for most casual users starting remains picking a distro, and to that end I think we as a Linux community need to stop recommending flavors of the month. Even Bazzite has come up against some recent drama and having to break down distro drama for a new users is an absolute deal breaker.
Based on their skill level and needs just get them into a bucket: Mint, Fedora, or Arch. They’ve been around forever, they’re stable, there’s plentiful documentation and there are no weird opinionated decisions buried in them that’ll go off like a landmine or confound troubleshooting. Install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, I’ve had less issues with those (until recently I dunno, we can revisit this point) but overall just everything simple and smooth for a transition.
Once people are on Linux they can start to come up with their own informed opinions depending on how well they take to the environment but at the same time there’s nothing wrong with starting and ending with the above distros.
(I actually don’t know much about Fedora, there might be a slightly better variant recommendation but it’s gotta be something analogous to Mint. I’m pretty adamant on vanilla Arch though, if that’s the route you want to go. Anyone who starts with Arch will be able to better determine an Arch variant down the road for themselves and are also more likely to do multiple installs. Doing so much as even a single reinstall may be a deal breaker for casuals).
100% agree, and made pretty much the same point in the LTT forum a while back. Flavor of the month people annoy tf out of me, I’ve been a linux user for over a decade and have never even thought of recommending something outside of the big 3 (debian/ubuntu (or mint if that’s your thing), fedora, arch)
Tried and true distros are the only real option and IMO the difference between distros once everything is configured is mininal
That’s not my experience of what happens. In fact I think it’s a problem that 95% of the suggestions I see are for Mint, and, unpopular opinion, I actually think Mint kinda sucks.
Isn’t the problem with Mint that it WAS the correct suggestion - years ago
And now it’s a bit shit and there are way better options
I think at this point Mint is a brilliant option for mom or Dad’s laptop that’s still on Windows 10 and Microsoft deemed “too insecure” for Windows 11, but Bazzite and other newer Distros do so much better at being distros for gamers right out of the box that those are better to recommend to gamers
Yeah, may have been. I haven’t been following many distros too closely until the past ~2-3 years.
After thinking some more on this, I think it may actually be preferable to suggest “flavor of the week” distros as long as they have a well supported base distro. In fact, I just thought about something a graphic designer coworker brought up a while back – he had been looking into Linux and had been hearing good things about a distro I still haven’t heard of anywhere but from him. It does kinda look decent: https://getaurora.dev/en/. Given that its base is immutable: Universal Blue, it seems like a solid choice for someone like him, as long as he can run a few graphic-y apps he might wanna use, like Krita and Inkscape, maybe Gimp. I think folks who are younger than me, like this coworker, are more open to picking up new tools instead of just clinging to Adobe garbage no matter what, and that’s a really good thing for the FOSS ecosystem as a whole! May be a good idea to let folks like that have a distro more catered to their aesthetic sensibilities. The base distro matters most for sure.
Mint is the most similar environment for Windows to more easily transfer over and get used to?
Mint kernel version appears rather old - does it support the latest AMD GPUs out of the box?
Yeah, I think that’s the thought process. And I’m not sure regarding the kernel version, but imo that’s the most important thing to stay relatively up to date on.
I like your thought so I wondered if there is a site to help people pick a distro and found this:
https://distrochooser.de/
For a windows gamer type of person it came up with Linux Mint
https://distrochooser.de/en/d59f9b3e7b9b/
…at the top of a long list of other choices. Not bad!
I had different results. I work in IT and understand the comprehension levels of the average user. The top result was a distribution where the Wikipedia was in Portuguese. No update in 5 years. https://distrochooser.de/en/d5cf19cdf504/
Nobara is Fedora but pre-configured for gaming. They mention it briefly in the video.
Mmm, this is kind of what I’m talking about. I’m certainly not knocking Nobara as a distro or people who prefer it, but taken from their FAQ,
It’s been around since ~2022 compared to Mint in ~2006
These are exactly the kind of points that a casual, new user would stumble across and in attempting to troubleshoot things from a Fedora perspective could trip them up severely.
My point is that casual users are already averse to making the switch and they are likely going to do ONE install and it needs to be as vanilla and stable as possible. If they turn into Linux nerds who want to distro hop later, they’ll find their way, but we need to keep things absolutely stock and simple.
A distro that’s been around for 3-4 years is plenty of time to be up and running. Bazzite runs great and has been around a similar amount of time.
Another thing that people don’t factor in: documentation gets outdated. When I was trying to set up my Ubuntu server, a lot of documentation on what I needed was 11-12 years old, and the syntax has changed since then. For newbies, this may as well just be “figure it out yourself”.
Exactly I don’t know why Linux mint wasn’t even mentioned.
Did he really just go to a random reddit post?