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!
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!
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
/varand/etc, and those are left intact during updates. They're also the only directories that are mutable on purpose (/var/home/youruseris found there). You can also layer RPM files ordnfpackages usingrpm-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.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.
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!
Thanks for the information!
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
Thanks!