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An OS should GTFO and let you get on with the business of doing shit on your computer, Linux Mint does that nicely. 🐧
I’m a relative basic bitch, I don’t want to spend forever in terminal. Mint has been a god send and I’m so happy I left windows for it. A special shout out to steam for being the goat and making what little gaming I do easy.
I use Debian as my daily driver for at least a decade, but I still recommend Mint because it has all the good things about Debian with extra.
Debian developers just push out kernel updates without warning you about any possible system incompatibilities, so for example if you have an Nvidia GPU you might get a notificaton to “update” and a normie will likely press it only for the PC to boot to a black screen because Debian pushed out a kernel update that breaks compatibility with Nvidia drivers and does nothing to warn the user about it, and then a normie probably won’t know how to get out of the black screen to the TTY and roll back the update.
I remember this happening before and I had to go to the reddit for /r/Debian and respond to all the people freaking out explaining to them how to fix their system and rollback the update.
Operating systems like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, etc, will do more testing with their kernel before rolling it out to users. They also tend to have more up-to-date kernels. I had Debian on everything but my gaming PC that I had built recently because Debian 12 used such an old kernel that it wouldn’t support my motherboard hardware. This was a kernel-level issue and couldn’t be fixed just by installing a new driver. Normies are not going to want to compile their own kernel for their daily driver, and neither do I who has a lot of experience with Linux.
I ended up just using Mint until Debian 13 released on that PC because my only option would be to switch to the unstable or testing branch, or compile my own kernel, which neither I cared to do on a PC I just wanted to work and play Horizon or whatever on.
I feel like I’m missing out on the mint hype train tbh. I’ve never tried it before but there’s an ignorant part of me that’s like “how much better could it possibly be than Ubuntu with Cinnamon?”. I know it must be because so many people default to it and rave about it, even after using Ubuntu.
My default ol reliable used to be Solus Linux. God I loved that distro. I had an install that lasted 4 years straight, no issues whatsoever.
But in recent years I’ve taken a major liking to Bazzite. Oh my god it’s incredible: immutable OSs are fucking amazing. I shouldn’t be trusted with accessing system files, it never ends well. So this really helps.
Another vote for immutable here. I’m running Bluefin for almost a year and I absolutely love it.
My buddy asked me about options for his computer since it can’t run win11, I gave him several, one of which was Linux. Gave him pros and cons. He took the bait. Been a week now on bluefin, so far so good.
Mint is my go-to for when I want something to get work done and don’t want to fuck with it. Biggest gripe is the networking menu in Cinnamon kind of sucks for VLANs and it’s still on X11 until they finish making Wayland stable.
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 or aurora if you don’t like gaming 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.
I’ll uh, I’ll take you up on that matrix add. My system is solid right now, but it’d be nice to have that option in my back pocket should I get stuck on something 😬
Edit: additionally, I agree wholeheartedly that immutable is the way forward for newbies in Linux, and honestly maybe even a power users workstation that needs maximum uptime/reliability.
I’ve been fiddling with Linux for over 20 years myself, but never INTENSELY, if that makes sense. I’d tinker with it on an old PC, dual boot my main PC, break it, go back to Windows for a year or two, tinker again, go fully Linux for a year, break it, back to Windows, etc etc.
I’ve been running Bluefin for almost a year, and I guarantee you it’s gonna stick this time. It’s so good, covers almost all my needs, and now I can’t break it!
Feel free to send me a message:
@communist:4d2.org
My experience with KDE is that it is a frustrating new user experience. I also doubt that the devs have tried setting up their desktop from defaults recently.
Kwallet (one of the two reasons I stopped using KDE): Kwallets defaults are bad. They encourage you down an opaque path that requires CLI intervention. If you stubbornly take that path the performance of kwallet is painfully bad. Any electron app (discord, etc.) will now hang unresponsive on the main UI thread for 1 to 3 minutes if kwallet was not already open. None of these apps need kwallet. Chromium stalls in the same way on startup except that if you don’t want to open the wallet it will keep asking 3-4 times taking minutes to reach the prompt each time and won’t unblock the main UI thread until you either enter the password or it crashes with an error that too many wallet requests were issued. Protonvpn won’t open on KDE unless a wallet is configured and unlocked. The password prompt has a time out for no cryptographically good reason which means if you try to open the wallet and then wind up distracted by something else you may time out and need to restart the waiting game from square one. Bugs have been open against kwallet for years. Allegedly they have been fixed and I have updated but the speed is still awful on my computer.
Fractional scaling: Nominally KDE does this the “right” way but practically application support seems somewhat absent. The flagship Linux office product, Libre Office, displays microscopically on one monitor with fractional scaling on. It just works on other DEs
Borderless fullscreen with mouse capture on multiple monitors is broken and results in the mouse wandering off and going MIA in FPS style games. KDE killed me in Helldivers several times before I switched windowing modes. Honestly minor except that it seems to be the default in gaming distros where this matters
Other DE issues:
- Cinnamon freezes on haswell age Intel iGPs
- XFCE handles cheap Chinese graphics tablets badly
- XFCE fractional scaling is confusing and requires updating too many settings. The flip side of this is it can run fractional scaling much more performantly than other DEs under x11 on lousy iGPs. The problem here is not that the scaling controls are inverted but that the graphics scale settings are scattered all over the place.
All in all I would say that Cinnamon is a lot less frustrating at an entry level than KDE on recent hardware.
Do you have the issue tracker for kwallets issues? This is my first time hearing of these. Out of all the people I have given this to not one has had any complaints with kwallet, it’s possible these issues were resolved, although none of my users were using vpn’s.
libreoffice uses xwayland, so that’s really on them to fix and there are simple workarounds.
both of which are pretty quick fixes, kwallet can be replaced and the libreoffice issue is a toggle in the settings. I usually set people up and make sure they can do everything they need to, these issues seem very minor compared to the issues with cinnamon
I don’t know how long I’ve used Debian at this point.
Desktop? Debian with GNOME. Laptop? Debian with GNOME. Tablet? Debian with GNOME. Server? Believe it or not, Debian without GNOME.
Debian is my favorite as well. I prefer KDE, though, because it is pretty. I also don’t get the GNOME hate, I just don’t love it as much and at this point KDE is way more familiar.
:s/GNOME/KDE/gOne small change and we could be twins. My Debian server also runs Proxmox though, that’s where I distrohop. In VMs.
Okay, I’ll bite:
Why GNOME? I personally find it very limiting, especially when attempting a Vanilla GNOME config.
A lot of people seem to feel like this. It’s obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.
And it’s always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.
I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don’t tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.
I guess average people are not opinionated about desktop environments. they got familiar with one, and it’s fine to them, they’re not even thinking about trying something else.
Out of curiosity, what music software are you using on Linux? I haven’t found a DAW I’ve liked.
We are just getting into this. One kid has been heavily using lmms the last couple of months. It is very limited but perfect for him composiing game music.
Other family just do basic editing with ardour. We want to level up a bit. Just bought a reaper licence and have been playing with it and a midi controller and some plugins.
Bitwig also looks very nice and seems easy to use.
We are newbs with this stuff. Normally I like to only use free and open source only but both reaper and bitwig feel like pretty good value.
After testing LM with Cinnamon, and a ubuntu based distribution with KDE… KDE is just better.
What are some things you preferred in KDE over Cinnamon? I haven’t explored KDE much.
Is it KDE Neon? I’ve been curious if it’s any good, haven’t tried. It’s just Ubuntu LTS with Plasma.
Neon is great, but don’t use it for mission critical stuff. I’ve had updates brick my system before because it’s bleeding edge for KDE.
kde neon is their testbed I believe, but there are other distros shipping it too.
opensuse leap and thumbleweed defaults to installing kde plasma. leap is the slower moving version, thumbleweed is the bleeding edge rolling release distro, if you want to try it.
fedora has a kde edition, that too seems to be stable, maybe its more polished too
I mean, depends on your style. I’ve been running endeavouros (Arch spin) on my desktop for two years now and it’s finally felt like home. Though I did my first mint install in maybe 5 years just last week on my media player box in the living room (Cinnamon version) and I’ve gotta say, it really does feel like “ubuntu, absent all the bloat”. Runs really great on a 15-year old dell optiplex with almost zero bullshit beyond having to install vlc-plugin-base.
First, that sounded so “I use arch btw”, love that.
Second, I managed to get mint running on a 04-05 model dell. I was so shocked I was able to get it to boot. It didn’t run too well, but it was amazing!
I’ve been recommended it as a windows replacement on my new MSI gaming laptop. I’m thinking about that or Zorin.
I run Lubuntunon some old laptops I have for the kids, but I’m interested in seeing how well Zoron handles hardware.
Really, I need to slap some boot usbs in it and try it out…
I started with Debian and XFCE and I still use Debian and XFCE lol
EndeavourOS is all i need and will ever need.
It’s so fucking perfect. Hadn’t felt so wowed by a slick put-together complete operating system since I first started using Mac OS X as a teen in like 1999. It’s literally more usable than every commercial OS on the market.
I’m still waiting for a useable screen reader :(
My first choice. Currently my only!
Solid first choice!
For me it’s been Arch for the last several years. It’s the only distro that can deal with the weird things I do while still working well for daily use.
can you explain a few of those weird things?
I like to edit configs, which can break apt, and build projects from source, which requires bleeding-edge versions of many libraries that most distros don’t ship with, which also tends to break apt when I manually install them.
Arch’s pacman gracefully handled modified configs and the Arch repos ship very new packages, so I don’t find myself fighting the OS.
