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Desktop Linux distros similar to Steam OS?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Steam Deck
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A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
The problem with using Bazzite as the solution to new users bricking their Linux installs is I've had Bazzite's update utility break itself 3 times now. I couldn't possibly recommend this distro to someone after that. I literally switched my desktop back to Arch for reliability reasons. Ridiculous.
Same. I gave up on Bazzite (for the time being) the second time it just stopped updating. The first time, I had to rebase it entirely to get it to work for a while again. I wouldn't want to put a new person through that. I'm not sure why everyone has a hard-on for immutable distros "for beginners" suddenly.
There are stories like this for every distro, unfortunately.
Yeah but in Bazzite's case one of those issues (the one from about a year ago) hit over 99% of their users. I really think that all these people talking about how great Bazzite is either haven't been using it for long enough for the devs to have fucked up or they just haven't noticed that their system hasn't been updating for the past year.