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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!

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[–] mina86@lemmy.wtf 34 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] mathmaniac43@lemm.ee 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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?

[–] countrypunk@slrpnk.net 7 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

LMDE is rock solid. I've been using it for a while and It Just Works.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 3 points 21 hours ago

That's good to know!

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[–] gepheb@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 3 points 23 hours ago

That's fair, I think I was confusing flat packs with snaps.

Thanks

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

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)

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[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

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!

[–] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

After trying out dozens of distros for years I didn't want to deal with stability issues and troubleshoot odd problems anymore. I reinstalled Mint years almost 10 ago. Mint has gotten significantly better and more stable with each release since.

Now I only use 3 distros on a regular basis. Mint as a desktop OS, Raspberry Pi OS, and Debian (with Cinnamon) for a server running software that requires Debian for support. Debian was far more difficult to configure than Mint even on the new Dell laptop being used as a server.

I still try out other distros occasionally in VMs and using Live USBs, but still haven't found anything that works as well on my hardware and for my needs as Mint.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 4 points 23 hours ago

A vote for Mint, good to know! Thanks!

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 6 points 18 hours ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] PeteZa@lemm.ee 3 points 7 hours ago

I am at 15 years and couldn’t agree more about having a distro with sane defaults. Mint is my 2nd choice behind Fedora.

[–] silentjohn@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 21 hours ago

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.

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[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Mint is a great first choice, and you should be able to do lots with it, but there's others you might want to at least be aware of, if gaming is important.

If you don't care about customization at all, Bazzite (Fedora). While you can update typical things like panels, icon styles, window decorations, etc., making changes to things like SDDM requires a little bit more creativity.

That's because it's atomic (mostly immutable). You don't have to worry about a bad update breaking your system, since you can just rpm-ostree rollbackand get back to it. The downside is that atomic distros have a different way they're designed, so learning how to work with them has a little bit of a learning curve, but it's worth learning, imo.

CachyOS (Arch). Kinda the hot thing right now. It's Arch but oriented towards gaming, content creation, and optimized computing. You'll have full customization abilities like a traditional distro, access to the AUR, and some really nice kernel and scheduler tweaking tools.

Pop!_OS Cosmic (Ubuntu). Pop!_OS has been a longtime popular choice, but they're currently throwing all their effort into their brand new Cosmic desktop environment, so I'd wait until everything is at least in Beta. It looks great, though, and I think it's going to set some new standards for user experiences.

[–] njordomir@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Huh, I hadn't heard of CachyOS. It seems like everyone went Arch>Manjaro>EndeavorOS. It looks good from the screenshots and I like seeing my favorite DE/WMs in there. If I don't know what any of those acronyms and technical terms on their page mean, would I still get something out of it? I'm about due for my every-few-months wipe and reinstall.

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[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Thanks for the recommendations!

Bazzite sounds interesting, but I'm not thrilled about it being immutable. I'll have to research what atomic means exactly, but if it's anything like steamos then I'm not sure I want the hassle for daily driving. I do want SOME customizability, in the sense that I don't want some hard work tweak I've implemented being nuked by an update.

CachyOS sounds cool, but arch scares me. I tried a complicated arch install on my Chromebook, and ended up throwing in the towel. Not a standard install, but still a bad first experience regardless. I'll still look into this though, thanks!

CosmicOS I might avoid just because I don't need beta instability right now. But still, I think I'm gonna at least live environment all of these and check them out.

Thanks!

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I do want SOME customizability, in the sense that I don't want some hard work tweak I've implemented being nuked by an update.

Bazzite can do that. Unlike SteamOS, you cannot edit the system files, so there's no customizations to wipe out. That said, user customizations generally live in /var and /etc, and those are left intact during updates. They're also the only directories that are mutable on purpose (/var/home/youruser is found there). You can also layer RPM files or dnf packages using rpm-ostree install. It's a longer install process than traditional package managers, but it ensures you always have a restore point.

As a sidenote, I do recommend also checking out distrobox, as it's a useful tool anywhere but especially on atomic systems.

CachyOS sounds cool, but arch scares me.

Don't be. Arch isn't a big deal. The only reason people tend to like it is because vanilla Arch is a blank slate. That means the user gets to decide what goes into their system, but distros like CachyOS take all of that choice and decide what to include for you, in advance. So you get the same update schedule as the rest of Arch users, but you don't have to think so hard about whether you want to use zfs or btrfs (for example).

If you want a great installation experience and mature community, I should also mention EndeavorOS. It's Arch, but boy do they have the installation and onboarding down really well. If you're nervous about CachyOS or Arch at all, check out this one.

CosmicOS I might avoid just because I don't need beta instability right now.

Fair, and it's not even in beta, it's Alpha. I just mention it, because it's going to be a big deal when it's finished. Keep an eye on it.

Spin up some VMs and give em all a try!

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 3 points 23 hours ago

Thanks for the information!

[–] neatobuilds@lemmy.today 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I was using popos regular LTS for about a year and always worked fine, no fuss getting nvidia drivers setup or anything.

I recently moved over to arch btw and using hyprland so its been pretty rough trying to get things working like I had on pop

[–] GustavoM@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

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!

[–] Wooki@lemmy.world 8 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (6 children)

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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Reliable. Ive never had a linux distro so stable. The risk and pain of change is a thing of the past.
  4. Largest and most up to date repo. Its simply unmatched.
  5. The list goes on to other areas like security, scalability and much more but lets leave it there.

Whats the bad?

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
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[–] jrgn@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

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 may 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 the wiki is AMAZING! If you don't do stupid shit, there 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.

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[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I use Mint for my main gaming PC, FWIW, totally rock solid

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[–] ColdWater@lemmy.ca 7 points 18 hours ago

I entirely ditched Windows for good for about 1.5 year now (I'm new to Linux and have no prior experience with Linux before that) but for me it's pretty smooth transition because I also ditched proprietary softwares and learn to use open source softwares, also stop play games that use kernel level anticheat

[–] Wojwo@lemmy.ml 6 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Honestly, Debian 12 bookworm with the KDE package is pretty damn solid. It's all I need for my desktops.

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[–] whaleross@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Similar story here. Tried some latest versions of popular distros. Settled with Fedora KDE. Fedora supported nearly everything in my convertible laptop out of the box where others were hit and miss. Easy transition from Windows 10. KDE doesn't enforce it's own opinions of desktop and workflow like Gnome does. Steam, Epic and GoG all play fine. It's my daily driver now. Much recommended.

[–] Mihies@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago

I'm considering transition from Windows like OP, tried Ubuntu desktop first, since I have some experience with server version, and for some reason it kept crashing on me, then I tried fedora workstation and it works reliable, so I'm planning to stick with it. NVidia card, Ryzen 3700, plenty of RAM machine.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out!

[–] EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

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).

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[–] Neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (5 children)

I highly recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed (or Slowroll). It is a rock-solid rolling-release where most things can be done from the YaST GUI. The installer is very granular, you can pick and choose based on groups of programs (like internet, office, desktop environment, etc) or individual packages (in advanced mode).

It has never broke on me and I have used it on and off for several years now. I like to tinker so I often do reinstalls of other distros when I break them but never needed to with Tumbleweed.

It is modern but not unfamiliar, rolling but not unstable, granular but not overwhelming (imho).

If rolling-release isn't your thing there is also openSUSE Slowroll which does updates monthly (apart from security updates which are back ported)

Even if you don't pick Tumbleweed, there are plenty of good options. Rapid fire I'll recommend some others.

  • Fedora Workstation: my next favorite distros for many of the same reasons as Tumbleweed, semi-rolling and major updates every 6 months, but no YaST or granular installer. It uses GNOME desktop environment.

  • Fedora Atomic: pretty much Fedora Workstation but more stable because the root filesystem is read-only and updates are pushed as an OCI image. You can still install anything supported by Fedora.

  • Universal Blue: Modified versions of Fedora Atomic which aim to be much more user-friendly and preconfigured out of the box. I recommend them over Fedora Atomic vanilla images. Bazzite is my recommendation for any gamer on Linux (though most distros work).

If you want to have a good experience on Linux, avoid perpetually out of date distros like Debian/Ubuntu and their derivatives. Linux game support is always improving, same thing with basically everything, so dont kneecap yourself with slow/stable release distros.

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[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

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.

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[–] shadshack@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (3 children)

never could get away from Windows entirely. Especially for gaming, and a few critical apps.

Been gaming exclusively on Linux now for few years, including in VR. Just few hours ago before my work day I was playing Elden Ring with controller. 0 tinkering, System key, "EL"[ENTER] then play. So... unless you need kernel level anti-cheat, Linux is pretty good for gaming nowadays.

Same of the few "critical" apps, I don't know what these are but rare are the ones without equivalent and/or that don't work with Wine, sometimes even better that on Windows.

Anyway : Debian. Plain and simple, not BS with a mix bag of installers (but you can still use AppImage or am or even nix whenever you want to). It just works and keep on working.

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[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] qyron@sopuli.xyz 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

LMDE or plain Mint. Or just go for Debian.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 hours ago

Another vote for Mint! LMDE was on my radar too, thanks!

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

What's your GPU? Nvidia's you will need to use the proprietary drivers, AMD it depends on how old it is but newer ones should be good with the default driver.

From the issues you mentioned on Ubuntu I think it's likely you have an Nvidia since it doesn't play completely nice with Wayland all of the time, which sucks because X11 is halfway out of the window.

Another thing I think you probably know but just in case, you can install different Desktop Environments on the same distro, no need to change distros for that. So you could install Plasma (and yes, Plasma is KDE) or Gnome on your existing mint installation.

Honestly I think Mint is great for beginners and if you're happy with it there's no reason to switch. One thing I always recommend though is keeping /home in a separate partition so you can reinstall or switch distros without deleting your data.

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[–] PeteZa@lemm.ee 4 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

I’ve been pretty content with Fedora for a while.

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[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Debian's pretty good, or if you need something a bit newer, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed seems pretty good as well in terms of a beginner's distro.

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[–] thequickben@lemm.ee 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I settled on Manjaro over the past year but since arch isn’t in consideration, I’d vote fedora or a derivative like bazzite due to its additions for gaming.

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