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!
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 was about to say that you should learn the “ins and outs” of Linux first before choosing a distro until I’ve noticed these part(s) of your post.
I’ve been toying with Linux on and off for almost 20 years now.
I’m comfortable in the command line
20 years is more than enough time for a user to use Linux properly. And with that in mind, well… you are overthinking it – just go with whatever you want, really.
That’s fair, yeah. I just haven’t been active or paying attention to what’s new and hot, or what’s stable and safe, or what’s stagnated. Just want some ideas, direction to go in. There’s a million options.
I’ve gotten some pretty good suggestions thus far. Thanks!
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.
Just ditched windows about 2 weeks ago and finally made the full time switch to Manjaro and am absolutely loving it
Nice! Glad to hear it! I’ve heard mixed reviews on Manjaro
No issues so far (fingers crossed xD)
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! 🤝
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.
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.
Mint is amazing and frankly if its working for you then I think you’ve found it. I stayed on mint for a long time until I relented to a nagging friend and tried out NIxOS and was amazed. If you have the technical skills and feel confident to push through the inital difficulty its well well worth it.
So whats the good?
- Reproducibility. Ever been annoyed that someone cant help you because they either dont have the time or just cant reproduce the problem? Its no longer an issue. Dependancy is managed by design so configuration and state is transferable with as little as only two files.
- Declarative. Best way to decibe this is all the benefits of Arch and zero of the problems. Declare your configuration in a file and then have a life. Ive never saved so much time before with any distro. Imaging installing windows, configuring the OS, installing apps, configuring them only once, ever, never having to do that again. Reinstalls go straight back to the way you like it.
- Reliable. Ive never had a linux distro so stable. The risk and pain of change is a thing of the past.
- Largest and most up to date repo. Its simply unmatched.
- The list goes on to other areas like security, scalability and much more but lets leave it there.
Whats the bad?
- Difficulty of entry. You need to have basic understanding on writting basic code to some degree as you define your config as a simple text file. I recommend vimjoyer on youtube he has some great simple intro videos that will help here.
- Using apps not in the repo. You will need to step up your config skills here to install that weird app you want. That is only unless you cant wait. If you have time the community is fantastic, a quick app request on the repo has a great chance of being picked up by some legend and added to the repo officially.
- The wiki, its no Arch wiki, thankfully you dont really need it. The community maintains a bunch of configs for hardware and apps on the repo which is weirdly not advertised half as much as it should be. Alternatively just search github for configs from other nixians.
That’s quite the glowing recommendation for nixOS!
Definitely a learning curve to installation, but I like the idea of config once/cry once, then in the future you’d never have to do it again. I’m just wondering how true that is in practice? Like, I configure it once, but over the course of a few years I install a bunch of stuff. Do I have to keep my config file manually up to date? Or once I’m up and running does this happen automatically?
I’m not opposed to a fair amount of cli legwork to things up and running, if the payoff is as good as you say.
I’m definitely curious about this distro, thanks!
Thanks. Nix made me a convert back from Windows. Microsoft doesn’t innovate anymore like they used to. iMO the origional concepts that sparked nix and now others like it has been a breath of fresh air into a stagnated critical cornerstone of the industry. Imagine being able to install every version of a dependancy like say .net thats ever been released without it causing a problem.
Install is imo better than even Windows, install from media, highly recommend kde plasma or gnome on your first round, but hey its nix, sky is the limit. Hardware will autodetect so long as you dont have anything out of ordinary.
Config once cry once cant be over stated enough how good it is. As for your concern about changes its really simple. Make the change, run the update command from terminal, reboot and if it fails (rare) juat reboot again and select your previous config, it keeps as many configs as you want to. I now only maintain the last 5 and run a cleanup confidently.
To update to the latest versions of apps and os its one command in terminal and nix checks your config for errors before updating. Some people run bleeding edge versions & update daily getting nightly apps, OS, and kernel even without issue. I sit on unstable, silly name, its stable as all hell, you just get the latest releases and features.
My worst experience was moving to home manager, but it was well worth it. The error nix presented was meaningless, the real error was just buried and I had to use journald to find the meaningful error.
What ever distro you use enjoy the freedom! Mint is great, Nix is great!
I also like that Mint comes with an Office suite and Timeshift pre-installed.
Yeah, nixos is great in some aspects, but a newcomer will be very displeased with a lot of nix specific things. And having quite bad documentation is no help either.
I made it very clear about the barrier to entry for nix and frankly I don’t think you give OP enough credit. They sound quite capable already familiar with mint
Wayland is the future, and the present. I wouldn’t shy away from it. I’ve been using it for years with multi-monitor and multi-gpu, it beats the hell out of having to dink with X11 about once a week to keep my screens in the right place.
And with X11 pretty much on life support, it’s time. And Mint isn’t the distro to do that on.
Ubuntu doesn’t push flatpaks, they push Snaps. But Ubuntu has a ton of other issues, so YMMV. It might be the one for you, who knows.
Mints fine, but if you are looking for stability, gaming, and you don’t care too much for customization, I’d recommend Bazzite.
Bazzite has all gaming tweaks built in already (including device drivers) so things just work, you never have to use the command line unless you want to (I just had a BIOS update from the KDE Discover store where I get all my updates from).
I’ve always ran Ubuntu of some flavour in the past but would run into things eventually breaking or not working well. Coming up on the 2 year mark for Bazzite on my laptop.
Another poster talked about it being atomic? Almost immutable? Have you ran into problems with anything like that? Changes you’ve made getting reverted?
Not OP but I will add to the conversation from my own experience:
I have been using Bazzite for over a year now, and I haven’t seen any changes reverted, everything works perfectly fine just as the day I first installed it. It just works. It’s been very easy for me to migrate from Windows thanks to this distro. I distrohopped and tried every major distros (10+), most of my issues were either outdated GPU drivers or unstable OS for noobs like me. Bazzite fixes those issues.
The gist of it is that it’s the easiest distro I’ve ever used. Just go to bazzite.gg and try it.
- GUI apps: use the app store that ships with Bazzite (called Discover)
- CLI apps or libraries: use Hombrew (open terminal, type for example: brew install pandoc)
- if you can’t find what you want either in Discover or Homebrew, the developer might ship it in a portable format called Appimage, you can easily “install” it using the included Gear Lever app. Alternatively, you can install packages meant for pretty much any distro using Box Buddy (built on top of distrobox).
Bazzite is described as atomic but not fully immutable because of how it handles system updates while allowing user modifications.
Atomic Updates
- Transactional Updates: Bazzite uses rpm-ostree, which applies updates in a transactional manner. This means updates are downloaded and applied as a whole, and the system reboots into the updated version. If something goes wrong, it can roll back to the previous version.
- Layered Packages: Users can install additional software as an “overlay” on top of the base system without modifying the core image.
Not Fully Immutable
- Unlike some truly immutable OSes (e.g., Vanilla OS in “ABroot” mode or Ubuntu Core), Bazzite allows modifications:
- Users can install extra software using rpm-ostree install.
- The system has read-only root by default, but users can override this with rpm-ostree override replace or rpm-ostree reset.
- Flatpaks, AppImages, Distrobox and Homebrew, don’t affect the base OS. You can install and uninstall software to no avail and it won’t brick your OS installation.
Thus, Bazzite provides atomic updates via rpm-ostree, ensuring stability and rollback capability, but it remains modifiable, making it not strictly immutable.
Thanks for the thorough write-up! That explains a lot!
I feel like bazzite might be taking the lead! Though I’m gonna check all of these out. Thanks!
Honestly, you don’t need to read anything about this. It’s really easy. In fact it’s easier than Windows.
+1 for Bazzite. It’s the non-distro that gave me the confidence to ditch Windows entirely last year after using Linux for work and occasional things for over a decade.
I haven’t had any changes reverted. It works more stable than windows. So much more stable that I’m noticing just how much bullshit I’ve put up with on windows 10.
That’s good to know! I’m definitely sick of Windows instability and constant bloated updates.
Mint Cinnamon has been great for me.
It is fully featured right out of the box and is a great drop-in replacement for windows. I will without a doubt use it when upgrading family members who are about to lose win10 support.
It is based off the popular Debian -> Ubuntu distros, and is very popular itself. This is good when it comes to quickly finding existing answers to specific questions. And of course they disabled the iffy stuff from ubuntu (snaps) while supporting flatpak.
I’m a software engineer who uses the command line all day, and I use Mint at work and at home. You see, even though the distro is a polished, full featured, and “easy” option, it is still Linux. So it is not locked down and you can still do what you want with your computer.
It won’t teach you to configure your system from the ground up like Arch might, instead it starts you off in a complete well-configured state and you can leave it alone or change it.
Thanks for the recommendation, and the explanation!
Thanks for tending to your replies so well!
😅
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?
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!
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!
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!
A bit late to the party here. These are my two cents based on my own experiences
Mint:
I’m currently running Mint on my work laptop. It’s rock solid, never had any problems. Apt is good, Flatpak and Brew had everything else I needed. I love Cinnamon and I like that minimal tinkering is needed.
Bazzite:
I have a big gaming laptop running Bazzite. I mostly use it to stream games to my shitty small laptop to have a poor-man’s Steam Deck. I am really impressed! Everything was just setup and working out of the box. I like the immutable concept. Everything is running in Flatpak and Brew. I can add Distrobox if anything else is needed. And rpm-ostree if I really need a program running “on the system”. Haven’t bothered tinkering with anything (other than changing wallpaper) because I liked it out of the box. One problem is documentation. There’s just so much documentation written for non-immutable distros which won’t work, since immutable distros works differently.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed:
I have a small 11" Chromebook with touch screen. ChromeOS was EOL on it, and Tumbleweed and Arch were the only viable option. Went with Tumbleweed just to check it out. I’m not impressed. I hate the package manager, and the settings are all over the place. I don’t really see the appeal and I much prefer EndeavourOS. With that said, it works. So I haven’t bother changing distro. Everyone seems to love it, but I don’t get the hype. Probably a me-problem.
EndeavourOS
It’s baby’s first Arch. It’s just Arch with sane defaults and everything set up for you. I love aur and I love that any program you make think of is just running on Arch. Endless possibilities for tinkering. I loved it, but not currently running it. I do wish I had it on my Chromebook but I haven’t bothered with the jump. I have broken it a couple of times. 100% my fault messing around with stuff I shouldn’t have messed with. But it was never that hard to fix. And if you don’t do stupid shit, it won’t be a problem.
Debian
Running it on my home server. Rock solid stuff. Great for running a server that doesn’t require bleeding edge and which is just super solid and extremely well documented.
Manjaro:
Stay the fuck away from that stupid shit distro. It almost bricked my laptop and required tons of work to get back up and running. They do stupid shit and the way they hold back packages is just stupid. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Just go with EndeavourOS or Geruda or something.
Ubuntu
No. Just run Mint
NixOS
Really really cool, but you need a bachelor’s in Linux and a lot of time to really reap the benefits of it. Shit documentation.
Thanks for the breakdown! Bookmarking this.
Ymmv though. Everyone seems to love Tumbleweed except me, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
These are just the distros I have experience using. I have also distro jumped a lot, so I’ve tried a bunch more than these, but not enough to have a very good opinion about them
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.
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!
