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!

  • Zink@programming.dev
    4·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • Clocks [They/Them]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Fedora Atomic (Fedora Silverblue).

    You can choose the KDE spin if you want.

    Bazzite is Fedora Atomic but for a more gaming focus.

  • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve used xfce in the past, and at least back then, it definitely wasn’t my jam. I appreciate how lightweight it is for older machines though!

      And yeah I’ve definitely learned a lot through these discussions. Snap vs flatpaks, and the benefits of Wayland.

      I’m leaving the op as is though, a record of things I didn’t know before haha

  • stringere@sh.itjust.works
    7·
    2 days ago

    I recently made the switch from Windows to Linux on my gaming desktop and it’s been a nearly flawless transition. I’ve been running Pop_OS without problems. If you have an AMD video card you might want to check Bazzite for a gaming oriented Linux distro. Any distro should allow you to use a different desktop, so which GUI to use is up to you. KDE Plasma has a lot of skins to choose from and is a pretty easy transition from Windows. You don’t even have to stick with a single desktop environment. I currently choose between the default Pop_OS or Plasma depending on my mood or use case.

  • julysfire@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 days ago

    Just ditched windows about 2 weeks ago and finally made the full time switch to Manjaro and am absolutely loving it

  • Wooki@lemmy.world
    11·
    3 days ago

    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.
      • Wooki@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 days ago

        Timeshift is a life saver but its still experimenting in the dark. Id rather not spend my life tinkering all the time. Office suite is an app & 1 word in a config.

        Mint is great for non technical people, but if you have the skill and crave more the innovation that nix introduced is singular.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2·
      2 days ago

      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!

      • Wooki@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 days ago

        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!

    • balssh@lemm.eeEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • Wooki@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 days ago

        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

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 days ago

    Mint is great as long as you don’t care about HDR or Wayland. Seeing as you don’t want Arch and Ubuntu is being a pain in the ass for you I’d say give Debian Testing a try. It has the newest packages unlike standard Debian. You can choose KDE, Cinnamon, or something else. I hear people constantly reccommending OpenSuse but I’ve never tried it so I can’t comment. If you just want to game and don’t care about much else then Bazzite is pretty great. Nobara is also popular. PopOS kind of sucks in my experience, I’d avoid it unless you know you’d like it.

    Edit: Forgot to clarify HDR support requires KDE Plasma or GNOME. Plasma has better support for it right now.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      Thanks! HDR isn’t important to me right now. Though I think I need to specify that I’ll be installing this on a framework laptop, and therefore, from what I’ve learned recently, Wayland is actually preferred because it enables some track pad gestures that x11 lacks somehow.

      I’m definitely leaning towards bazzite, because people seem to think it’s not that bad even for general use, and it ticks a lot of boxes.

      Though nixOS is on the table. I at least wanna try my hand at configuring it.

  • mina86@lemmy.wtf
    38·
    3 days ago

    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
      13·
      3 days ago

      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.worksOP
      3·
      3 days 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!

  • shadshack@sh.itjust.works
    61·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Adiemus@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 days ago

      Same here. Coming from Windows, Kubuntu seems like a good choice for me (though I might change one day).

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      Thanks for the input! Glad it’s working for you!

      There are some great recommendations on this thread, I’m excited to try them out!

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    5·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      Yeah I’ve been using a steam deck since it’s release, Linux gaming is definitely a million times better than days of yore.

      Thanks for the Debian recommendation! Not a bad idea.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 days ago

        I also have a SteamDeck and it’s IMHO one of the best device to promote Linux. Just hand skeptic the device, let them play and ask them how the experience then if they can guess the OS.

        • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
          1·
          2 days ago

          Yeah honestly, I set up a Windows SD card for dual booting, and I’ve used it maybe once. SteamOS is where it’s at for the steam deck. Premium.

  • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works
    22·
    3 days ago

    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.

  • jrgn@lemmy.world
    81·
    2 days ago

    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.

      • jrgn@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 days ago

        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

    • PeteZa@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      2 days 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.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      71·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
        2·
        3 days ago

        Funny you say that, I dual boot Bazzite and Mint, for gaming and everything else including programming, respectively.

        Bazzite is a pain to install and use CLI applications in, but it’s got a great default setup for gaming!

        • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
          1·
          2 days ago

          In what way is it a pain? Because of the immutability? See that’s what I was worried about, but was assured that ostree could be used somehow? I still haven’t had time to look into it

          • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
            2·
            2 days ago

            I’ve found it needed a lot of extra steps, plus fidgeting with the OSTree defeats some of the safety/stability of it all. Bazzite, at least, recommends against using OSTree blindly as that’s meant for sysconfig and recommends using Homebrew instead, as this lives in your user space and touches very little; but even installing libqalculate gives memory issues. Most things I attempted to install did, actually. The Ruby interpreter installed just fine, and was the only CLI program that installed just fine IIRC.

            Now, I feel like it’s less of a hassle to Just Use Mint®, especially since I’ve got it installed anyway.

      • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
        32·
        3 days ago

        Objectively bazzite is much better for beginners, the mint crowd is a bit out of date, here’s why:

        bazzite is immutable, that means it updates a core system all at once with previous versions easily selectable if something breaks.

        there are more advantages to immutability, and one of those is that bazzite has significantly more up to date software, this matters for a huge number of reasons, bazzite has a much more up to date desktop with vastly improved features. Mint will also hold these features back for much longer because if something goes wrong it’s catastrophic, whereas for bazzite you’d just revert to the previous version. Not that it’s likely for anything to go wrong.

        Back in the day mint was the best choice, but now that this innovation has spread bazzite is just better, and the mint people haven’t updated their choice/preference. I honestly think there’s no objective reason to recommend mint over bazzite to beginners.

        Bazzite is also more secure because it’s sandboxed ontop of being less likely to catastrophically fail because of immutability.

        • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
          1·
          3 days ago

          Interesting, this is the first I’ve heard of Mint being behind the curve on updates.

          I do like the idea of bazzite, and I understand that you can do a lot of stuff without worrying about immutability getting in your way. But I do worry it might be a bit TOO hand holdy?

          I’m not a Linux newbie, I know how to get dirty if I need to. I just want something nice and stable, to minimize the need to, if that makes sense 🤷‍♂️

          But still, I’m not a guru, I’ve messed things up hard enough to need to reinstall before. Even though theoretically you shouldn’t need to do that🤷‍♂️

          • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            But I do worry it might be a bit TOO hand holdy?

            There’s nothing you can’t do because of it. Bazzite specifically has rpm-ostree which means basically anything you can do on a non-immutable distro you can do on it. There’s no real downside. If you decide to get dirty and fuck up in a way you don’t know how to fix/don’t want to learn, you can rollback, on mint, you’ll have to reinstall.

            You can still learn to do these things on bazzite, they just aren’t mandatory.

            • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
              1·
              3 days ago

              That’s really good to know thanks, I guess I need to do some more research into how exactly it works. I’m not informed on rpm-ostree yet. But I’ll take your word for it, and take it into consideration!

              Definitely leaning heavily towards bazzite right now.

              Of course I’m gonna do my due diligence and at least test out most of these distros. But look and feel only get you so far, so I appreciate the input of what’s under the hood!

  • EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    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).