Why Mint and Ubuntu?
Keep noticing that when taking about Linux distro recommendations (on Reddit) users recommend Mint and Ubuntu for gaming.
Now don't get me wrong, they're great distros and with a bit of work are great for games, but I feel like theres better recommendations for new users looking into getting into gaming on linux.
When it comes to gaming I've found them to be mid at best, but I think that's exactly why they get recommended a lot. Stability (as in using old but not too old drivers) and a broad and easily accessible knowledge base in term of tutorials and answered newbie questions.
Mint is a straight swap. Knowing everything about your PC is so much work. I would rather just game and not have to be a programmer to not see ads every 5 seconds.
people asking for those recommendations are newcomers to Linux and Ubuntu and Mint (especially) are both very newcomer friendly with large support communities when any questions come up
once they become more familiar with their system, they can turn to the Arch Wiki and the Gentoo Handbook as they fine-tune things
but neither Mint nor Ubuntu are going to hit you with any big surprises – unsupervised access to AUR in Arch, long compilation times in Gentoo, obscure (and semi-documented) programming language in Nix, or dealing with commands that are a little bit different in BusyBox, musl, or OpenRC systems …
As always the correct answer is … “it depends “
Ubuntu and mint are fine for new users…
If you hand a new driver a car, you’d want them to have a more simple reliable car. Key in , start, drive turn brakes… etc.
But if you want to: tune the fuel air mix; lower the rear tire pressure for grip; or adjust gear ratios… then you can give them Arch or Gentoo
Similarly to windows or mac; Ubuntu and mint mostly just work, and kinda just do what it says on the tin.
The reason for Ubuntu is that it's the distro corporations (like Valve and AMD) are most likely to officially support.
“support” being a vague term. Steam runs everywhere, they don’t even use Ubuntu for SteamOS. And it’s actually easier to install AMDs rocm on other distros and ofc Ubuntus drivers are outdated.
I've been usung mint for about a month now.
I want to get rid of Windows, but I don't want to spend my day sudo-ing my ass off.
Give me a gui for everything and doubleclick installers, and a release that is stable above all else.
I'm open to suggestions though! So shoot away which distro I should be using :)
My nephew uses arch btw.
zorin? it's designed to be very familiar for windows users
Debian. Same base, no extra bs. Rock solid and reliable. Outdated packages are a non-issue for a casual user. Gaming needs a bit of configuration but it perfectly doable. Installation is apparently difficult but... I don't know where that comes from. It may not be Calameres-smooth but it's perfectly understandable even to a novice.
Ubuntu is the most popular and common distro
OEM vendors primarily use it as their reference distro when testing and supporting drivers, hardware, applications, games, etc.
It's the path of least resistance.
What are the better recommendations in your opinion?
I keep seeing Pop!_OS brought up for gaming.
I've been using Pop for a few months as my daily driver to replace Windows. It had been a few years since I'd used Linux and I wanted something stable for Nvidia drivers. I've had next to no issues with it.
I tried Pop!_OS 3 times, and all 3 times, my computer crashed irrecoverably at some point.
I ended up replacing it.
I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Up to date packages but with relatively good stability due to how they're tested. Rolling release distros are always more risky, but for gaming you probably do want up to date packages to ensure graphics drivers and bleeding edge versions of Proton, Vulkan and even Wine work as expected. I think that's most true for newer games and those where you may need to use Proton Experimental. Its also a good broad distro for other uses, rather than solely focused on one element like gaming.
Steam Deck is based on Arch; it's not quite rolling release but they do relatively frequent updates to their version of Linux so a rolling release distro is probably going to be closer to it than most annual release and certainly LTS released linuxes.
Nobara is also a good distro to consider. It's made by the guy who game up with Proton-GE and is gaming focused. It's also rolling released and optimised more for gaming including the kernel. I use it on a living room PC for the past 5-6 months and like it so far.
I like Bazzite
Microsoft has been radicalizing me more and more these days.
I have an i7-12700k and an RTX 3080. I heard Nvidia is tricky because of drivers, but any issues with using intel CPUs with Linux?
Where should I, a complete noob, begin? I’m intermediately technical, moderate/semi-intermediate with command line, etc. Is Mint the best way to go?
I tried pop_OS! a few years ago but my computer couldn’t run it well for some reason - lots of lag despite having an i7 7700k at the time and installing it on a separate spare SSD. Reinstalled it twice but still had issues with noticeable lag in the OS. My specs were great, but that OS turned me off unless it has substantially improved since then.
not so much as Mint being the “best way”, but Mint being a safe, friendly starting point – once you get your feet wet, you can start looking around at the other options (which can be pretty overwhelming initially) – and just as a lot of people use Mint as a jumping off point, a lot of people also stay with Mint
and yes, despite distro-hopping being a running joke, it exists because Linux distros make it relatively easy to do
the biggest change to keep an eye on is the development of atomic (“immutable”) distros – anything that makes it harder to bork your system and easier to recover afterwards (including recovering all of your configurations and customizations) is getting a lot of attention
Exactly this!
that OS turned me off unless it has substantially improved since then
That was my experience with Pop!_OS too. I tried switching to it after finding that Ubuntu has a lot of bloat.
In the end, I went back to Ubuntu, because it works right out of the box - even with my Nvidia graphics card! (only from 20.04 onwards; 18.04 and older versions were problematic)
When I reinstalled Ubuntu, I chose the custom / minimal installation option, and that cut out most of the bloat.
I'm personally not a fan of Mint - tried it for a month or so. My impression is that if it works with your muscle memory, it works well. If not... then even Windows ends up more user-friendly.
I'm particularly not a fan of the "start menu" because you don't really get a lot of space for pinned apps, and there's no way to really modify that. I ended up liking KDE quite a lot more. It takes a bit longer to set it up to what you like, but its customization means that while there's a bigger upfront cost to setup, it's much smoother once it is set up.
I'm using KDE Neon (Ubuntu + KDE), which I'm pretty happy with. But I'm also debating whether to switch to Kubuntu (also Ubuntu + KDE for some reason)
I'm still surprised how little attention Nobara gets when it comes to this. It's such a wonderful just works out of the box distro.
That's sorta what I'm getting at. For PC gaming, I'd recommend Fedora and Nobara over Ubuntu,
They're simple to get into for anyone with an introductory interest in Linux, although I haven't liked Ubuntu in ages. My Mint setup took a bit of effort but it does game pretty well. Fedora could be a good recommendation too, I liked that when I tried it out. There's some gaming focused distros like Bazzite or Nobara, but I feel like I can get a "normal" distro working to a similar state for games, and I don't have to hope that a small team doesn't fold and my distro loses updates support.
I'm trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed this week, wanna see if it's a good alternative to Fedora.
I don't dare try Arch yet, and thus I also wouldn't recommend it to any new user.
I switched to Tumbleweed from Mint a few months ago (having toyed with many distros over the years, and recently Nobara and Manjaro).
I like Tumbleweed - it's a good mix of up to date packages, system stability (so far, I accept rolling release is inherently always going to be risky) and a good ecosystem. I find it very user friendly thanks to Yast, but with lots of freedom for power use.
I also like that it's a an offshoot of a European Linux company rather than a big tech company like IBM. I'm not a fan of the direction redhat has taken and the impact some of its priorities seem to have on Fedora. I'm sure SuSE impacts a lot on OpenSuSE but of the big enterprise Linux ecosystems I currently prefer it over Ubuntu and Redhat.
I've used Mint for close to 6 years on various desktops and laptops and it's rock solid reliable. My main computer runs LMDE 6 without any issues.
Mint and Ubuntu are easy to setup, and will generally work well out of the box, so great recommendations for people who have to ask.
Personally I use Manjaro, which also works out of the box, and I like the rolling release scheme, my wife uses Debian and both work great for games.
My wife had some initial problems with Debian and PipeWire sound system but it works fine now, and in fairness she is a musician and uses some weird audiosystem that can record 8/16 channels. So I bet "normal" systems wouldn't have noticed any problems.
I still use pulse audio because I'm lazy, and if it works don't fix it.
I'm using Tuxedo OS. Based off Ubuntu, but without snaps, and using a up-to-date KDE desktop environment. I don't like Cinnamon.
There are better "gaming" distros, but unless someone uses their PC exclusively for gaming, when it comes time to install other kinds of software for school or work or whatever, they're going to get thrown in the deep ends of Linux.
But guess what does have two decades of software and tutorials to set up just about everything in existence? Ubuntu, and by extension Mint.
Sure you can squeeze more out of your games with something like Bazzite, but the general platform that anything Linux-native targets is usually Ubuntu. Sure there's distrobox and stuff that's like telling the average gamer to go set up WSL. It's not hard per-se but the amount of things to learn increases very quickly.
Thus, even though Ubuntu is very average these days, it's still a safe bet for new users.