Looking for a new distro. Ditching Windows.
Looking for a new distro. Ditching Windows.
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!
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.
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?
- 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.
- 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.
- Reliable. Ive never had a linux distro so stable. The risk and pain of change is a thing of the past.
- Largest and most up to date repo. Its simply unmatched.
- The list goes on to other areas like security, scalability and much more but lets leave it there.
Whats the bad?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
amor evennixwhenever you want to). It just works and keep on working.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.
I wanna new distro
One that won't make me sick
One that won't make me crash my PC
Or make me feel like a d**k
I want a new distro
One that won't hurt my head
One that won't make run CPU too high
Or make my NAS disks RED
One that won't make me defrag
Watching squares of blue
One that makes me feel like I feel when I use UNIX too...
When I get to boooot you.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
/homein a separate partition so you can reinstall or switch distros without deleting your data.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.
Debian with XFCE here - I do just have a single monitor though so I suppose I'm not running into complicated display issues anytime soon. It has been extremely solid, I forget to update my system for months on end and then remember to do it one day and it just works. XFCE is boring like Debian but that's why I like it: it stays out of my way.
I work on RHEL at my day job so Linux isn't just a hobby for me, and I love being free from Windows. Honestly the only thing I keep a windows VM around for is an installation of Adobe Acrobat PDF reader because I'm too lazy to set up signatures on Linux since I don't sign that many documents anyway. And maybe a couple of windows servers from a few keys I've got lying around to learn AD on.
We've been on similar journeys. I started with Ubuntu Warty Warthog and happily remember all the desktop effects lost to time (emerald window decorations anybody?). I went through a Windows phase and settled back into Linux. My newest epoch is the age of self hosting and I've been learning a lot especially since the advent of Lemmy. I also play games, but I've been using a fully segregated Windows PC for that, though I've used Linux in the past.
The last time someone asked this question a lot of people said Mint packages are too out of date. I love Mint, I used Mint for several years, but the graphic driver stuff seems to depend on being very up to date. Someone else could probably explain it better than me. Perhaps it's not relevant anymore, but I would look into it.
As for KDE, it's really good now. I used to cling HARD to Gnome back in the old days and really disliked KDE, but things really got shaken up and KDE has been absurdly good for a few releases now. The steam deck even uses it. Also, a lot more distros seem to have releases for more than one desktop environment now. I guess what I'm trying to say is stuff you used to like may suck now and stuff that used to suck could be S-tier. Good luck getting back into Linux. Don't get discouraged. It's gotten a lot easier since old timers like us were hacking around on Ubuntu in the early 2000s.
Gnome with extensions like dock to panel and arcmenu (need those two at least but with them its pretty near perfect), or kde plasma are your best bet, plasmas almost too easily customizable I find myself messing with it a lot.
I ditched Windows for a year ago and have been happy user of Linux Mint since then. It’s solid, nice and easy to use. I don’t like much of customization, all I want is easy to use and solid system and Mint with Cinnamon is all that. Years ago I was distro hopping around but now I don’t need that.
I would say Fedora workstation if you hate the idea of getting arch-like distros but Manjaro if you just dislike the daunting procedures to get your arch work