this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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Please stop recommending mint. These days now modern alternatives are just better, especially when they might want to game even just a bit. But it's not just shut taking, mint is kind of stuck in the past for a lot of things.
Perhaps it would be useful to list some alternatives?
Bazzite for gaming. If you don't want immutable, a lot of people have been recommending CachyOS lately.
I love Cachy, but would never recommend it to a Linux newbie.
Start with Bazzite. If you need more control, switch to Fedora. Cachy is a good choice for those already comfortable with Linux and the commandline.
Interesting — how easy are they to install compared to Mint, and would there be a way for Mint friends (I have a NixOS config for my fleet, and run our shared services) to easily migrate?
I can only speak to Bazzite, but it's super easy to install. GUI installer, walks you through it step by step.
People might say that you are restricted with Bazzite, but that isn't really true. You can do pretty much anything you can do on an non-immutable OS, it's just a different process. You just use rpm-ostree instead of dnf. Tons of shit on google if you search.
All major Linux distributions are roughly equally trivial to install these days. Mint is actually harder due to the relatively old kernel at least having more potential for lacking hardware support causing issues. The actual process is get similar for most of them.
Frankly the installation isn't what is likely to cause issues for most people. But something breaking down the line, or wanting a new something (at adding app/functionality/running Windows program/...). How hard/easy it is for them to figure out how to fix that.