Hello guys i have a qustion about which distro i should use?
I want to dual boot windows and linux
I just want a safe place away from microsoft eyes to do edit and drawing and other hobbies on my pc. And playing some games like cs2 & 2d games Also the distro run my wallpaper engine Should be popular distro so if i have a problem i can ask about it
Please dont tell me linux mint because i tried it 3 times and everytime i do anything simple the distro goes off and i should re install i won’t give it anymore chances thank you 😖
Edit: thank you guys for typing your suggests. after some search i will give bazzite try and if won’t work like i want. I will go with the other suggests I really enjoyed reading all your suggests
Based on your last paragraph, you might fall in the supernoob catergory. You’ll want an immutable distribution, you can’t break those Unless you tell it to let you break it.
As a windows user, you’ll find familiarity in Fedora Kionite.
If you prefer a touchscreen oriented experience consider Fedora Silverblue.
There’s a few other options on the page I’m linking, I haven’t tried and therefore can’t recommend either of the others.
https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
Edit: my formatting was 🗑️
Edit 2, electric boogaloo:
OP in your post you state you want Wallpaper Engine to work, unfortunately, you’ll have issues there. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with wallpaper engine you may be able to do the same using KDE Plasma. I personally use a VLC command line call to enable animated wallpapers on my rig, there’s not exactly a standard for it on Linux so many of the solutions you find will be clunky. Just remember if you go around messing with your xorg.conf file you need to have a backup of it so you can undo changes easily in a terminal.
You’re welcome to DM me if you need assistance.
For a more gaming-ready experience, Bazzite might suit you:
People seem to love bazzite, is it all its cracked up to be?
I’m happy with my lmde htpc/server/gamingrig/clusterfuck so I’m not planning on changing, but I’ve been in the market for a handheld gaming PC and its been on my list to try.
No, Bazzite is very hardware dependent. Good if you use the same hardware as the devs. If you don’t, it’ll make you want to go back to Windows.
The only thing that will get me back on windows is the Net Yaroze SDK which came out for windows 95-XP, I have a period accurate airgapped PC for that stuff though.
grumpy graybeard/neckbeard here but bazzite and bluefin feel like what I wanted out of Linux 25-30 years ago and I’m so glad we’ve reached this point.
I put Bazzite on an Intel n100 box I’m using as an HTPC. Super easy install and it was ready to go and working just fine very quickly. Jellyfin works really well! It really is quite incredible how far things have come since my first install of Ubuntu 14.04. Atomic could really make some headway on making Linux easy for a typical user. Wine has come a LOOOONG way help keep compatibility too.
Way better than my Ubuntu desktop. The only thing hold me back on putting an atomic distro on my desktop is not familiar with how things like Python venvs would work for development. That and I use a global hotkey program for Team speak since they haven’t updated to handle Wayland global keys.
I mainly use my Bazzite machine for gaming and it was rough at first (~1 year ago) but it seems like compatibility has made leaps and bounds recently. I don’t play a ton of different games but I’ve had to do very little tweaking to make them work. 90% have been install-and-play. Usually ProtonDB can help you work out the kinks.
As a noob I really like it. I ran popOS for almost a year, then arch for like two months. I tried fedora for like a week before arch but then decided to try bazzite on a little htpc for the living room, then put it on my main gaming desktop, now I have it on my laptop where I edit photos and videos as a hobby and its been pretty solid.
I don’t really like that it wants you to use flatpaks for everything, since darktable as a flatpaks kept crashing and rapid photo downloaded didn’t have a flatpak so I ended up installing stuff with the ostree rpm but rapid photo is old and not sure how to update it to current version
You can use distrobox to install a version meant for another distro, afaik
Bazzite is just kinoite / silverblue repackaged as Universal Blue, and then modified to preinstall some qol apps and settings. So if you like the original, but don’t want to start with a blank slate, want the nice things out of the box, start with Bazzite/bluefin/aurora (gaming/gnome/KDE).
For people who know what they’re doing/want, starting blank slate makes sense. For newbies or people who don’t feel like dealing with that 🙋🏼♂️ the latter is a better recommendation imho
I was under the impression that the fedora atomic distros are hard to dual boot on a single drive.
Historically yes, but this appears to not exactly be the case any longer.
Reference https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/284
There does appear to be a way to do it, from a cursory glance at the above it seems that Fedora and Windows need to have separate EFI partitions, I’m not all that invested though (I don’t use these distros nor do I dual boot) so I don’t really care to look much deeper.
I think immutable is great for everyone, I struggle to find a point against it but maybe I’m a supernoob too hahaha (I use NixOS, btw)
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Or maybe they’re just genuinely a fan?
I don’t even like fedora ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just thought it’d be easier.
Ah I see, pretty far from a shill then lol
Yeah, those people who use and recommend it are just in the pocket of Big Fedora!
Buddy I’ve got my pronouns in my username please don’t misgender me.
Additionally, your response is needlessly hostile. You’ve offered no additional information and have chosen my comment to be a naysayer on presumably only because it is the top comment on the post. You’ve contributed nothing but vitriol to this thread.
I couldn’t give two shits what distros people use, and I’m not a fucking shill. OP wanted a suggestion, I gave 4. I used tobhse Fedora because it’s easy, with a large community, and with the bleeding edge release cycle the newest libraries became available more easily without enabling testing repositories or using sketchy PPAs that haven’t been vetted.
If OP weren’t noob, and weren’t someone who has already broken a mint install three times I’d have recommended that use something Debian based or Arch based, but they are, so I didn’t.
Relevant post I made:
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.
Thank you i will search about bazzite and see what i can do
If you don’t like the gaming stuff try aurora, feel free to message me on matrix.
Okay good, you also included Aurora. I agree almost completely with your previous post that mint is outdated, and an immutable is much better for someone who has no idea what they’re doing. No reason to blanket recommend Bazzite, hence the aurora comment.
I’m on Bluefin though, so that’s where we disagree 😏 Don’t know what it is but I’ve never liked KDE.
Thank you for that info, I tried to use mint on a laptop with a touchscreen but the touchscreen didn’t work, so I will try your recommendation.
If your computer can’t handle Linux Mint, then either you do something wrong, or your computer is really unstable. I won’t ask you to use Mint, but I will say, that I use it on three different computers, and not a single problem anywhere. Dual-boot is notoriously unstable - mostly due to MS… So my advice is, to use a computer for Linux by it self…
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I suggest you to check out Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. I have been using it for years without any problems. I also have dual boot with Windows, but I think I will delete Windows soon and use only Linux.
My name is none of your business, and I approve this suggestion.
For most of us using Linux distros for years, we already have a preferred distro that is highly unlikely to be Ubuntu or even Debian based, but for first-timers, I honestly believe Mint is the way to go. But seeing how mint has been a flop for you (as another poster said, it’d be great to know what went wrong) an immutable distro (like Bazzite) would fit your current needs better, but these distros are not the best way to start learning about Linux and eventually migrate from Windows entirely.
EndeavourOS is the best imo because it’s basically arch with a minimal skin on it to aide in installation etc
I’ve been using it for the better part of 5 years now with no issues. I play games, self host, work etc It’s great.
If you install paru you get access to the AUR which has everything under the sun ready to install.
Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
You say not to suggest mint, but you most probably used an Ubuntu based Mint so that doesn’t count.
Ill die on this hill but give pop_os! A try, last time i tried it it was really polished.
Pop’s the distro that made me go full linux. It let me tinker and have the linux experience without a lot of setup or preexisting knowledge.
Honestly, Linux Mint is probably the best option. Failing that, Fedora is another good option which is derived from Red Hat, it does things differently to Debian based systems like Mint and Ubuntu, but it’s widely supported.
You’ll need to iterate what you were doing when it stopped working, 99% of the time, it’s down to human error. As someone once said:
“Unix [or Linux] will give you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. If you didn’t think rope would do that, you should have read the man page.”
Linux Mint
What sort of “simple” things did you have trouble with in Mint?
You could try popOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu. But without knowing what you struggled with, Mint should still be the best choice of you’re new. Your troubles could just be the desktop environment you picked, or enabling third party/proprietary repositories. Or they could be a legit issue that is easily fixed using a different distro.
Well i did it beffore one month so i dont remember wheat happened clearly but i remmber the first problem i have was the net then the sound then steam games and porton that problem when i tried to fix rust not working i Accidently broke the system the second time i was careful with everyting i did everyting right then after one day of using i start to have black screens lag crashes and sometimes the games dosent open and sometimes when i play the game just close and dont open i am not talking about just rust i tried another games. I left the games alone i tried to just update something i don’t remmber what was anyway from the update manger then screen just off i didn’t know what happened i just re install it again and this time i did everyting right but i wasnt happy with the appearance so i did a lot of things make the system cool but when i start in the wallpaper yp you know i destroy the system while trying to make wallpaper engine work so i just left mint i was having a lot of problems but that was when the system died and what i remember of it
Looks to me like Nobara might be what you want, it’s fedora based and is tailored toward gaming. I haven’t used it myself, so I can’t comment on how it’s different from fedora, but Fedora itself is pretty darn solid
I dunno, I started with Debian and then many months later learned that it was one of the harder distributions given the outdated packages.
Glad I chose Debian because Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, PureOS, etc are all derivatives of it.
My advice: Stick to distros and softwares that are widely used. When presented with options, use the defaults.
Just because literally 100% is customizable in the Linux world does not mean you have to customize your system 100%.
That’s my motto since 1996 when I started using Linux.
I’m always shocked by all the recommendations to use Mint. It feels dated and ugly. Admittedly, I migrated from Mac, but how abused must you Windows users be to find Mint a suitable replacement? I personally wound up with Zorin OS and recommend it. The software store makes installing apps from multiple sources tolerable. It’s also got a nice UI and you can easily change it.
Mint is always recommended because it just works, it looks windows-like, it’s legit fine no it doesn’t look dated or ugly. Cinammon is hot.
Thing is. Mint is for the most part a just works distro. Based on Ubuntu it is very easy to find help for it. Combine that with a load of sane defaults like disabling snaps. The default UI and theme could defiantly use a facelift
I personally don’t see much value of Mint or Ubuntu over Debian.
They all suffer from the same issue: lack of a user repository. This means any layman is going to immediately be turned off by the distro and the whole Linux experience as soon as they want to install something that isn’t in their distro’s repository.
Neither derivative distro can be considered ‘easier’ because of this. Might as well just go with Debian and cut out the middlemen.
I have spent so much time professionally in Windows over the years that when I decided to switch it had to look nothing like it. So Mint is out. Kde as a whole really. Vanilla gnome looks kinda sterile to me. So I ended up with Pop!_OS and have been happy so far.
Thank you! When switching it has to work better and look better. Mint does not look better. Zorin is very simple, includes Wine and has Zorin Connect.
I agree. People should raise their standards… the message is if you’re switching to Linux, shouldn’t be “just be glad to have a distribution that just works.” I think we’ll need a better sales pitch if that’s the case.
I had no issues with Zorin from a “it just works” perspective and I run an NVidia GPU. And, it also looks good. Like Mint, it’s also based on Ubuntu, but without the Windows XP era UI.
Also, the UI can either be in “has a start menu” or “has a Mac dock” mode.
Probably because it’s easy to get used to.
As for the looks, I’d say it looks better than Mac, Ubuntu looks best, but that’s so subjective and fairly easy to change anyway.
I think my first distro was Ubuntu ( but that was because everyone around me was using it only) before I finally migrated to Debian less than a year later. Mint and Ubuntu both use Debian as their base. (Mint technically uses Ubuntu as it’s base but has a Debian edition as well for backup reasons).
I know Debian’s problem is it’s software repos(Debian Stable can be filled with older versions of software). But it can’t be denied that it is rock solid (for most part), has a comparatively decent set of software in its repos and a large set of distros use it as their base.
My only gripe is the default cursor. I hate it
It feels dated and ugly
Weird, mine came with Cinnamon, not Plasma
