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!
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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.
Another poster talked about it being atomic? Almost immutable? Have you ran into problems with anything like that? Changes you've made getting reverted?
Not OP but I will add to the conversation from my own experience:
I have been using Bazzite for over a year now, and I haven't seen any changes reverted, everything works perfectly fine just as the day I first installed it. It just works. It's been very easy for me to migrate from Windows thanks to this distro. I distrohopped and tried every major distros (10+), most of my issues were either outdated GPU drivers or unstable OS for noobs like me. Bazzite fixes those issues.
The gist of it is that it's the easiest distro I've ever used. Just go to bazzite.gg and try it.
- GUI apps: use the app store that ships with Bazzite (called Discover)
- CLI apps or libraries: use Hombrew (open terminal, type for example: brew install pandoc)
- if you can't find what you want either in Discover or Homebrew, the developer might ship it in a portable format called Appimage, you can easily "install" it using the included Gear Lever app. Alternatively, you can install packages meant for pretty much any distro using Box Buddy (built on top of distrobox).
Bazzite is described as atomic but not fully immutable because of how it handles system updates while allowing user modifications.
Atomic Updates
- Transactional Updates: Bazzite uses rpm-ostree, which applies updates in a transactional manner. This means updates are downloaded and applied as a whole, and the system reboots into the updated version. If something goes wrong, it can roll back to the previous version.
- Layered Packages: Users can install additional software as an "overlay" on top of the base system without modifying the core image.
Not Fully Immutable
- Unlike some truly immutable OSes (e.g., Vanilla OS in "ABroot" mode or Ubuntu Core), Bazzite allows modifications:
- Users can install extra software using rpm-ostree install.
- The system has read-only root by default, but users can override this with rpm-ostree override replace or rpm-ostree reset.
- Flatpaks, AppImages, Distrobox and Homebrew, don't affect the base OS. You can install and uninstall software to no avail and it won't brick your OS installation.
Thus, Bazzite provides atomic updates via rpm-ostree, ensuring stability and rollback capability, but it remains modifiable, making it not strictly immutable.
+1 for Bazzite. It's the non-distro that gave me the confidence to ditch Windows entirely last year after using Linux for work and occasional things for over a decade.
Thanks for the thorough write-up! That explains a lot!
I feel like bazzite might be taking the lead! Though I'm gonna check all of these out. Thanks!
Honestly, you don't need to read anything about this. It's really easy. In fact it's easier than Windows.
I haven’t had any changes reverted. It works more stable than windows. So much more stable that I’m noticing just how much bullshit I’ve put up with on windows 10.
That's good to know! I'm definitely sick of Windows instability and constant bloated updates.