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
I dunno, I started with Debian and then many months later learned that it was one of the harder distributions given the outdated packages.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.
Keep to popular distros. I’d personally recommend Pop os or fedora. Opensuse is up there too just never clicked with me when I was a new users.
I actually have started to discourage people using Ubuntu because of forced snap packages and multiple software store GUIs. It has led to a lot more confusion for new users even though Ubuntu is supposed to be user friendly.
Agreed. It was good for that for a long while, but there are much better options for newbies nowadays.
Any major distro will work, it’s the Desktop Environment that you’ll want to examine. Whether GNOME, KDE, Xfce, etc. the DE is what you’ll mostly deal with when computing. Try distrowatch.com for a good overview of various flavors. I, personally, have always started newbies off with PCLOS with KDE, as Tex tends to avoid the bleeding edge in favor of stability.
I just installed Nobara in a similar setup for similar reasons a few days ago after having several bad experiences with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint. I wanted to move away from Ubuntu-based distros and Nobara seems like it’s focused on gaming (frequent updates, etc). It’s been… I dunno if great is the right word, but pretty good. I run into difficulties of some variety with almost everything I do (can’t install battle.net in lutris because it hangs at 45%, lutris can’t log into epic games store, etc), but I’ve also found solutions for them without too much trouble and the games that I have managed to install run great.
Yeh I don’t think Nobara is beginner friendly. I’d say my experience was the same as yours. Difficulties with lots of things, but could find solutions. Given it wasn’t my primary PC, and I don’t have time for that - gone for mint (needed some stale stale kernl)
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.
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.
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
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.
It feels dated and ugly
Weird, mine came with Cinnamon, not Plasma
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.
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.
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.
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.”
It’s 2025, if you’ve got the space to dual boot, you’ve got space for snapshots. There’s no reason not to set them up. Btrfs, ZFS, LVM, pick your poison. Disk is cheap, your time isn’t.
And if “simple stuff” is breaking your system, that tells me three things:
-
You’re still using apt-get instead of apt
-
You’re ignoring dependency warnings
-
You’re probably not fully understanding the commands you’re running — so RTFM
So yeah, I will be telling you to use Mint, with at LEAST daily snapshots.
Well no i really use everyting on the newest version and i check two times on everyting i put or press even when downloading anything simple like discord or browser i search first then do but it just somewho goes off and now i spent more than 15 hours on bazzite to just download it. i am learning first then act after doing everyting things right and checking i said to myself this time i won’t mess with the termnal for 2 days to not make my system broke and guess what after downloading steam and brave and wallpaper engine and dis i was looking at my downloaded wallpapers changing them then the screen goes black and the desktop dosent response i can search inside the system and open taps but the desktop broke and now i am looking for soultion i didn’t even put a single command or play with the system i was just changing my wallpapers and that also happened in mint not the wallpaper issue but with other simple things like download one app form the software manger
Sounds more like a hardware issue. Screen black, like it goes off no output? Any visual glitching first? Desktop doesn’t respond? How do you know, is it sounds stop or make funny noise?
Search inside the system? Open taps? Not sure what this means
Can you restart the computer? Or will the distro not boot after this?
And this doesn’t happen in Windows?
Okay, assuming you’re being honest, it sounds like a hardware issue. Either your RAM is corrupting, or your hard drive is prone to errors. The good news is that you have options to daily drive Linux without ending up in a situation where you have to reinstall everything from scratch.
Like I mentioned earlier, you absolutely need to be making snapshots. I’m currently running Manjiro, and I’ve completely borked my system like 10 times already. But when I set up my system, I made sure my main partition was BTRFS, which has allowed me to roll back easily through both the UI and in grub rescue mode.
I would also recommend that if you are going to continue to dual boot windows, make sure they’re on two separate physical drives. And don’t share stuff like your steam library, because windows likes to screw shit up, and steam will throw a fit if you make it read an NTFS drive on Linux.
Just don’t give up, keep posting questions, and maybe even come back and post stuff like specific crash reports and system info so we can help you better. :)
I fix the problem it was just the plugn who read wallpaper engine i think glitched after reading a unSubscribed wallpaper so i just had to go delete the plugn and all my wallpapers and re install after some reboot and changing the wallpapers settings it fixed dont ask me how the wallpaper was unSubscribed and there in the same time i really dont know 😂
-
My advice: Stick to distros and softwares that are widely used. When presented with options, tend to stick to 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.
Linux Mint
Honestly I suggest learning in avm first so you can do save states. I recommend doing stunting like nix or a declarative/ composable distro. Learn the new way so that your getting the tools and things that are actually being used.
Don’t get me wrong it’s not an easy learning curve but I think it’s the better method of learning.
If you get to the point where you decide you want a distro that is not immutable, try Garuda, it’s where I went after Bazzite. It is also gaming focused and has a great helper app to install most of the things most people need and do updates.
ZorinOS maybe ?
Bazzite is great for gaming !
Nobara too.
I suggest BazziteOS. I have it installed on 2 of my computers for about a year and it works great. It runs KDE and it looks similar to Windows but is much better. Also, I believe it has support for Wallpaper Engine, though I haven’t tried it.
It is Fedora based and Fedora also has a sizeable community for any questions and tutorials you may have.
The reason why I recommend Bazziteos is because it comes out of the box ready for gaming, you would have steam, wine, lutris, etc installed almost instantly and ready to play.
I just finished downloading bazzite and now creating a backup on flash for both bazzite and windows using ventoy because i know myself i will do something stupid to make me re install systems
Chances are that, if you do break something, it’ll be on the Windows side.
Bazzite is very solid for new users as it’s very convoluted to access and modify anything system related.
Having said that, if you have any intention to learn how to use Linux distros, and eventually remove Microsoft from your life, immutable distros like Bazzite will limit you dramatically, so I suggest you start with a regular “mutable” distro. Now, if your intention is just to have something that works, scape Windows every now and then, and come back to Windows, it’s hard to beat an immutable distro.
I’m pretty sure you can also advance with Bazzite. I haven’t done anything too advanced, but I can imagine one can learn a lot simply by learning the ujust commands as they would apt.
Absolutely. Maybe I’m a bit biased. I can’t stick to anything immutable (other than my Steam Deck, and believe me, I’ve tried many times), and always come back to distros I can have absolute control over.
However, I have all my employees running Silverblue (mostly because none of them even know what CLI means 🤣).
Try Manjaro. It will be the easiest to set up and find software that hasn’t been deliberately packaged for your setup.
Clearly this comment is unpopular but it sure would be handy if anyone took the time to say why
(I used to be a Manjaro user)
Let’s say Manjaro has a bad history and a lot of people don’t take them seriously anymore and trust them even less.
At the very least it is quite a messy distro to use.
I’m not sure that you can get wallpaper engine running. Maybe someone else can say otherwise, but I wouldn’t trust second hand.
There is a project that can run some backgrounds, but is very experimental and IMHO not suited for running constantly as a desktop background. WPE is way too deep in specific windows features to be able to run on linux smoothly.
