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
The age old question. You have to understand that Linux the kernel is made in such a way that anything built on top of it will always require way too much from the user. It feels like something made from programmers for programmers, just like how UNIX was designed. No distro will be able to change that. Windows is packed with bandaids to make it behave closer to what users expect, but anything that comes from UNIX has it’s focus in making the code nice, not making ordinary users happy necessarily.
So picking a distro is entirely a choice on how you wanna interact with the kernel’s interfaces, but they’re still the same interfaces. No pretty UI will change that.
Just make sure that the distro you choose has a mature community behind it and that packages are being actively maintained. Make sure that if you file a bug report it will get some attention. That’s the only thing you should care about in a distro, everything else is flashy nonsense.
Android runs an only slightly modified Linux kernel, and yet the OS requires much less from the user than e.g. Windows or MacOS.
Chromebooks run a bog-standard Linux kernel and the target audience is kids.
My car’s entertainment system runs a standard Linux kernel, and the UX is so cut down that PC expertise really doesn’t matter when using it.
MacOS and iOS, two systems known for their ease of use, both stem from BSD, which comes from Unix.
The kernel has nothing to do with this.
In fact, the only mainstream kernel used in user-facing operating systems that doesn’t “come from Unix” is Windows. Everything else is derived either from Linux or BSD, which both are derived from Unix.
There isn’t even a mainstream phone OS anymore that doesn’t “come from Unix”.
If you don’t root your Android, you can barely do anything. The UI on Android hides all of the ugliness of the implementation and that shows up as jarring bugs, which you can do nothing about as an ordinary user. If you use the manufacturer’s stock OS it’s always a horrible experience as well. They also use kernels which are very far from upstream and have a ton of custom proprietary patches. That’s exactly my point regarding flashy nonsense. And that’s exactly what Windows does as well.
Chromebooks rely on containers and web apps, but once you need to configure your OS, good luck.
MacOS and iOS rely on the company’s complete control of their hardware, OS and apps. They have the most closed system out there and rely on things not changing too much. They also expect users to pay for every little inconvenience.
I’ve been using Linux for plenty of years now, I’m a fan, I love the model, I love the way it’s developed, but I also recognize the issues it has. I love programming and going deep in the system, but that’s not what ordinary users necessarily want. That’s just the reality, the kernel is not setup and documented in a way that would allow easy comprehension and configuration. If you don’t have that, then what can a user do when they have to configure the OS and you always need to do that for one reason or another. Companies like Canonical tried to market a model of keeping the system stable and comprehandable, but it never worked out in practice.
This person has no idea what he’s talking about and his input can be safely disregarded.
Wow such an informative comment, great argument. <3
I switched to Mint and I’m loving it. Its almost a windows experience on the UI end. Takes a little getting used to. But if you grew up using windows enough to know how to navigate a file system you’ll figure it out pretty quick.
OP specifically declines to use Linux mint, per their final point in their post. As a 2 decade user who is currently using Mint, OP is right. The windows experience is so handholdey that new users often aren’t familiar with even HOW to research to fix their problems. Mint, a distribution that gives you training wheels but will not hold your hand is not ideal for someone who has already broken it several times, doing activities they didn’t feel were necessary to share.
OP needs an immutable distro.
I’ve been thinking about making the switch. How difficult do you find it to play steam games on your setup?
I switched to Linux Mint like a month ago and Inhad no problems at all. Valve pushes Linux a lot since the Steamdeck. Had not a single problem with a game. I even played Itch.io games. Just set the compatability options to proton and most stuff will run fine. Online Multiplayer games do make problems though. They have kernel based anti cheat and that is not supported. If you are unsure check this website for the games you play: https://www.protondb.com/
For me was difficult i tried to run rust using proton and tried to run some games on it like the witcher 3 beatblock and inscryption some games work and the others no i fix it and make all of them run but still after playing sometime i have crushes and black screen and even just the game desied to close and not work i wasnt care that much on gaming on linux but sometimes i just wanted to open the game for a minutes but nope
LMDE (mint sans ubuntu) user here, gaming is a dream, but sometimes a nightmare. You may need eventually to manually update the graphics card driver If you’re on Nvidia, as the debian repos it pulls from are hella out of date. Otherwise, smooth sailing.
You’ll likely only encounter problems on native games, Feral ports specifically seem to assume people have a libraries that they don’t, so I often find myself launching their games in a terminal a million times to figure out what libraries are missing and manually link them or just copy them into the game lib folder.
Fedora or UwUntu.
Fuck Red Hat and their closed source bullshit
While I agree with the sentiment, fedora is fairly independent to their RHEL in terms of operations right?
I just don’t want to associate with anything Canonical or Red Hat if I can help it
I get that but at this point shouldn’t we get more people on this side. Like I think redhad and canonical are infinitely better than microsoft. Lesser of 2 evils and all. Who knows one day they may start using arch (btw)
Also uwuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu.
Or, why not use something that’s neither of the three?
Suggestions?
I use NixOS FWIW
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
Obviously you can’t completely rid yourself of all RedHat influence but Fedora is their literal upstream community testing ground and LMDE really does limit their influence heavily and that of Canonical (Ubuntu) by just building off of the more community based Debian (which Ubuntu built off of as well)
I agree. I don’t trust any of the shilling surrounding their distros.
Fedora KDE would be my suggestion
Try Fedora KDE, then move to NixOS.
Suggesting NixOS to a completely new user is stupid. NixOS is cool but very different from almost all Linux distros. Comes with its own language you have to learn as well.
I have to give it that the Fedora distros are a slightly bit superior to Ubuntu variants but for those that value some degree of not favoring corporate US (IBM/Red Hat) that provides AI resources for Israel’s military to do what it is doing… Myself I tried to like Mint, I really did… but could not… not just it is old-fashioned looking but has limitations with scaling and others.
Now, I do recognize for the initiators is it great! Now, for those that find Mint ugly I recommend TuxedoOS… I find it as good as Kubuntu but without its known limitations with flatpaks. Yes, TuxedoOS was created for Tuxedo laptops but they left it open to use it with others so no problems at all and very well maintained. Now, you may want remove the Tuxedo app that they installed just to free some resources… a 10-seconds thing to do. Drawback is servers in Germany so a bit slower updates than usual for most.
Mint is a good transition from windows
Tried it and hate it
What did you hate from it?
Yeah, honestly I don’t get all the love for mint whenever this question comes up. Bazzite’s a good choice, I’m running Bluefin it’s sister (same thing but not geared toward gamers) and it’s been great from a set it and forget it perspective. One caution is that they don’t always play nice with dual booting, so make sure you do your due diligence backing up what’s important to you.
Linux Distro made to accommodate Windows Users by being as similar as is reasonable is UI and organization: AnduinOS.
If you try it, use 1.3, as you are not an enterprise use case.
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 🗑️
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.
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.
As a noon 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 pit 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 good.
I don’t really like that it wants you to isw flatpaks for everything since darktable as a flatpaks kept crashing and rapid photo downloaded didn’t have a flatpak so o ended up installing stuff with the ostree rpm but rapid photo is old and not sure how to update it to current
You can use distrobox to install a version meant for another distro, afaik
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.
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
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.
Don’t fall for the memes. Immutable distros aren’t actually easier for noobs.
Let me guess, he’s a fedora shill.
(reads further)
Confirmed.
All new users need to be aware of the incessant shilling fedora users engage in on these forums.
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.
Yeah, those people who use and recommend it are just in the pocket of Big Fedora!
Or maybe they’re just genuinely a fan?
I don’t even like fedora ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just thought it’d be easier.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Should be popular distro so if i have a problem i can ask about it
I mean, Arch has the Arch Wiki which is very good. (I use Arch, btw.) 😸
I’m surprised Mint is giving you trouble. Where you doing something… risky? Or maybe the hardware you’re running isn’t very compatible?
Otherwise, a distro like VanillaOS (or any immutable distro) might be able to keep your system more stable.
Well it’s my fault a little but mint was so much sucks in my own hobbies and give a lot of crashes and lag i was so angry in the last time i tried it i wanted to type sudo kill system but i didn’t i just remove it from windows
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
Just note that is you really need a safe place, having Windows installed on the same machine is counter productive. Make sure you encrypt your Linux partitions. Otherwise it’s very easy to mount them and sniff all the things from Windows.
I don’t think that’s right because windows cannot even read linux files and if i just separate the partitions i am safe form windows stalking
No. Windows does not support ext filesystems without a third party driver.
cute
Ill die on this hill but give pop_os! A try, last time i tried it it was really polished.
