this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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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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[–] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Honestly, Debian 12 bookworm with the KDE package is pretty damn solid. It's all I need for my desktops.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

Another vote for basic Debian. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I use Mint for my main gaming PC, FWIW, totally rock solid

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

Good to know!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

Interesting! First mention of opensuse I think. I've always heard of it but never checked it out.

The Fedora recommendations are really stacking up though. A lot of emphasis is being put on the benefits of being up to date. I hadn't realized it was that important, but I'm inclined to believe it.

Thanks for the recommendations! What are your thoughts on bazzite? Being Fedora atomic based.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I'll second tumbleweed. I use it on 4 separate devices and its rarely given me any issues. If it does, it has built-in recovery snapshots - it takes 30 seconds to roll back a bad update.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I use mint on my daily-driver/gaming-rig/mediaserver. I've been a Linux user for 20 years, eventually you just want a normal distro with sane defaults. Mint is wonderful.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yet another vote for Mint! I'm going to test drive all of these, but so far I think I'm tied between mint/lmde and bazzite.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Funny you say that, I dual boot Bazzite and Mint, for gaming and everything else including programming, respectively.

Bazzite is a pain to install and use CLI applications in, but it's got a great default setup for gaming!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Objectively bazzite is much better for beginners, the mint crowd is a bit out of date, here's why:

bazzite is immutable, that means it updates a core system all at once with previous versions easily selectable if something breaks.

there are more advantages to immutability, and one of those is that bazzite has significantly more up to date software, this matters for a huge number of reasons, bazzite has a much more up to date desktop with vastly improved features. Mint will also hold these features back for much longer because if something goes wrong it's catastrophic, whereas for bazzite you'd just revert to the previous version. Not that it's likely for anything to go wrong.

Back in the day mint was the best choice, but now that this innovation has spread bazzite is just better, and the mint people haven't updated their choice/preference. I honestly think there's no objective reason to recommend mint over bazzite to beginners.

Bazzite is also more secure because it's sandboxed ontop of being less likely to catastrophically fail because of immutability.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Interesting, this is the first I've heard of Mint being behind the curve on updates.

I do like the idea of bazzite, and I understand that you can do a lot of stuff without worrying about immutability getting in your way. But I do worry it might be a bit TOO hand holdy?

I'm not a Linux newbie, I know how to get dirty if I need to. I just want something nice and stable, to minimize the need to, if that makes sense 🤷‍♂️

But still, I'm not a guru, I've messed things up hard enough to need to reinstall before. Even though theoretically you shouldn't need to do that🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

But I do worry it might be a bit TOO hand holdy?

There's nothing you can't do because of it. Bazzite specifically has rpm-ostree which means basically anything you can do on a non-immutable distro you can do on it. There's no real downside. If you decide to get dirty and fuck up in a way you don't know how to fix/don't want to learn, you can rollback, on mint, you'll have to reinstall.

You can still learn to do these things on bazzite, they just aren't mandatory.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

That's really good to know thanks, I guess I need to do some more research into how exactly it works. I'm not informed on rpm-ostree yet. But I'll take your word for it, and take it into consideration!

Definitely leaning heavily towards bazzite right now.

Of course I'm gonna do my due diligence and at least test out most of these distros. But look and feel only get you so far, so I appreciate the input of what's under the hood!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Mint is fine. Rather than changing distros, rather keep using it and configuring it the way you want it. For the most part, GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux and many popular distributions are largely the same.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I used Mint for a long time, I like it and Cinnamon. My laptop at home is running LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition), which is not based directly on Ubuntu like "normal" Linux Mint, and it works great.

I recently set up my desktop with Debian and KDE Plasma and think that will be my standard build moving forward. I have some home servers that are running Ubuntu and I was planning to rebuild with Debian anyways, so a Debian baseline across all my machines makes sense and should be easy to maintain.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I hadn't realized mint was based on Ubuntu. But now that you mention it, I did notice flat packs in the software installer 🤔

Is LMDE stable?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

LMDE is rock solid. I've been using it for a while and It Just Works.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

I didn't have terminal transparency available OOTB, and it didn't find my Nvidea GPU drivers, either.

Ubuntu-based Mint does, for me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

That's good to know!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Another thing you might want to try is Mint with the Mate DE, which is based on old GNOME 2 code (and therefore can load the old add-ons like the 3D desktop cube etc)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Oh man, I do miss the cube. Are there modern versions of the cube? I don't want to run outdated code, for the sake of stability

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I've heard that KDE has a cube effect

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

I'll have to look into this, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There's nothing wrong with flatpacks as far as I'm concerned. Ubuntu in the other hand is using snap instead - that one's a bit fishy because the snap-store isn't free.

I'm afraid I cannot help with LMDE as I use Mint/Cinnamon.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

I appreciate that, thanks for the insight. I guess I wasn't sure that it was that much better or necessary, and l know I've read a lot about incompatibility. But, if that's where everything is going, and it's better, then I'm willing to suffer through the growing pains.

Yeah thanks I was confusing snaps with flatpaks 👍

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

A vote for Mint, good to know! Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Cachyos works perfectly fine for me, it installs all the packages has a cachyos steam compatibility thing, just works for everything, had to install blender off the official site because the aur package has issues and had to grab those amd drivers seperately but thats about it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

If you want immutable go bazzite, cachyos I initially dualbooted before erasing my whole drive and reinstalling because I didnt want to deal with windows ever again, piracy is harder, other than that everything I use works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

Thanks for the recommendations! I've gotten a lot for bazzite, and a few for CachyOS.

I'll be honest bazzite is looking better and better, but with CachyOS at least I could say I use arch btw lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

When I run arch, I end up building pretty much exactly what fedora does. Once I realized this, I just install fedora now ;)

Easier to maintain, pretty dang current, “just works” like mint/ubuntu does. But I don’t do anything crazy though so it works for me.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Huh, I hadn't heard of CachyOS. It seems like everyone went Arch>Manjaro>EndeavorOS. It looks good from the screenshots and I like seeing my favorite DE/WMs in there. If I don't know what any of those acronyms and technical terms on their page mean, would I still get something out of it? I'm about due for my every-few-months wipe and reinstall.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I was about to say that you should learn the "ins and outs" of Linux first before choosing a distro until I've noticed these part(s) of your post.

I’ve been toying with Linux on and off for almost 20 years now.

I’m comfortable in the command line

20 years is more than enough time for a user to use Linux properly. And with that in mind, well... you are overthinking it -- just go with whatever you want, really.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

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