this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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I will be the black sheep that strongly recommend against Mint. I have had more hardware compatibility problems trying to run Mint than any other distro. This is anecdotal, but consistent enough that I would make bets on it. Secondly, I hate Cinnamon, the default desktop environment. There are better choices.
Instead, I’ll suggest Fedora KDE. It’s rock solid, reliable, and the KDE Plasma desktop is the best currently available whether you leave it stock or customize it.
If you want to try things out, set up a spare thumb drive with Ventoy, which will let you boot to any ISO you copy to it. Most distros have “live” versions that you can boot to from the thumb drive and try out before installing. That said, most linux distros install in 5 minutes, so don’t be afraid to try anything and everything you’re curious about.
Also, avoid Cachy or other Arch based distros for now. They are great, but a far more hands-on. Something for the future, when you are more comfortable with linux in general.
Fedora is a good option. I'm surprised to hear about hardware incompatibilities with Mint, though. Do you have obscure or bleeding-edge hardware?
I'll +1 the Ventoy suggestion. Lets you try lots of things easily. Try at least Fedora KDE, Ubuntu, and Mint. Go with whichever feels good to you when you try them out.
You don't really need to be bleeding edge to have some hardware issues or Cinnamon Mint. Their wayland transition is still ongoing so HDR, variable refresh rate, fractional scaling and maybe some bugs for specific hardware might be present. X11 has also seen a lot less love recently after the major distros stopped actively supporting it.
KDE has nailed the Wayland transition so moving to Fedora KDE would have fixed Wayland/X11 bugs.
Finally someone else said it.
Just adding that since they game Bazzite is maybe the better option but still fedora based.
But I've too seen compatibility issues recently with Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros, but not really with Debian based ones (yes, even though Ubuntu is based on Debian). I don't know why, but even MX has given me less troubles recently than Mint (not that I'd recommend base MX though - I just heavily customized it so that it's elderly friendly, so people who basically barely can use a browser and have poor eyesight).
Its not that bad to start with arch it's not as hard as it used to be. I started with endeavourOS approximately a year ago and most things just work out of the box and you don't need to do much and honestly i find it easier than having to navigate layers of abstractions.
Most of my time went into configuring stuff like hyprland, nvim and other stuff and arch just worked.
I came with 0 linux knowledge, the only terminal commands i knew were cd and ls and if not for arch I don't think I would have been hooked on linux. That being said, I get it and sometimes it is frustrating but just putting it out there that it's doable.
I moved an older relative to Mint and I regret it. Weird lagging and display server crashes sometimes, probably because of X11. Plus it's release cycle is very slow, so old packages. Ubuntu is far from my favorite distro, but at least it uses a DE with first class Wayland support.