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!

  • Silent John@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    17 days ago

    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.

    • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      16 days 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.

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
    2·
    17 days ago

    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.

    • njordomir@lemmy.world
      1·
      16 days ago

      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.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      0·
      17 days ago

      Thanks for the recommendations!

      Bazzite sounds interesting, but I’m not thrilled about it being immutable. I’ll have to research what atomic means exactly, but if it’s anything like steamos then I’m not sure I want the hassle for daily driving. I do want SOME customizability, in the sense that I don’t want some hard work tweak I’ve implemented being nuked by an update.

      CachyOS sounds cool, but arch scares me. I tried a complicated arch install on my Chromebook, and ended up throwing in the towel. Not a standard install, but still a bad first experience regardless. I’ll still look into this though, thanks!

      CosmicOS I might avoid just because I don’t need beta instability right now. But still, I think I’m gonna at least live environment all of these and check them out.

      Thanks!

      • NeatoBuilds@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        17 days ago

        I was using popos regular LTS for about a year and always worked fine, no fuss getting nvidia drivers setup or anything.

        I recently moved over to arch btw and using hyprland so its been pretty rough trying to get things working like I had on pop

  • Wojwo@lemmy.ml
    2·
    16 days ago

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

  • mina86@lemmy.wtf
    2·
    17 days ago

    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.

    • mathmaniac43@lemm.ee
      1·
      17 days ago

      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.

  • ColdWater@lemmy.ca
    2·
    16 days 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

  • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    17 days ago

    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.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      3·
      16 days ago

      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.

      • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
        1·
        16 days ago

        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.

      • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
        0·
        16 days ago

        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!

        • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
          0·
          16 days ago

          In what way is it a pain? Because of the immutability? See that’s what I was worried about, but was assured that ostree could be used somehow? I still haven’t had time to look into it

          • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
            1·
            15 days ago

            I’ve found it needed a lot of extra steps, plus fidgeting with the OSTree defeats some of the safety/stability of it all. Bazzite, at least, recommends against using OSTree blindly as that’s meant for sysconfig and recommends using Homebrew instead, as this lives in your user space and touches very little; but even installing libqalculate gives memory issues. Most things I attempted to install did, actually. The Ruby interpreter installed just fine, and was the only CLI program that installed just fine IIRC.

            Now, I feel like it’s less of a hassle to Just Use Mint®, especially since I’ve got it installed anyway.

    • PeteZa@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      I am at 15 years and couldn’t agree more about having a distro with sane defaults. Mint is my 2nd choice behind Fedora.

      • IngeniousRocks (They/She) @lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        13 days ago

        I wish Fedora worked for me, something about it just doesn’t run right on my lappy and I like to have the same distro on all my machines so it’s a nogo across the board for me.

        I like Fedora, it’s nice, it just absolutely won’t play nice with my macbook and I’m not gonna get a new laptop just for better Fedora support when this 14 year old hunk’o’junk still works perfectly with mint.

  • whaleross@lemmy.world
    1·
    17 days ago

    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.

  • 3DMVR@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    16 days 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.

  • GustavoM@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    17 days ago

    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.

  • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    13 days ago

    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.

  • kcweller@feddit.nl
    1·
    16 days ago

    +1 for mint. I’ve been using pop, zorin and manjaro, but since I’ve used mint I completely switched to daily driving it on my personal devices and my gaming PC, even going so far that I got it installed on the company laptop 👍

  • thequickben@lemm.ee
    1·
    16 days ago

    I settled on Manjaro over the past year but since arch isn’t in consideration, I’d vote fedora or a derivative like bazzite due to its additions for gaming.

  • Wooki@lemmy.world
    1·
    16 days ago

    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?

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. Reliable. Ive never had a linux distro so stable. The risk and pain of change is a thing of the past.
    4. Largest and most up to date repo. Its simply unmatched.
    5. The list goes on to other areas like security, scalability and much more but lets leave it there.

    Whats the bad?

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.