Spoiled for choice is a good thing, and it’s one reason why Linux is great. I think the community could do better at two things in this regard:
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Helping new users understand that the choice is not really a major one (relative to making the switch to Linux). Adjust whatever to your needs as you learn, or distro hop.
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Not jumping down new users’ throats if they pick Ubuntu / Mint / Fedora / whatever. Again, the freedom is a plus. A new user picking Ubuntu doesn’t make an older user need to use Ubuntu. Let the new user have that joy of discovery how they want it.
I think if we all focused on these, the community would be better off for it. I’m all for a good ribbing about distros between experienced users, but it definitely can scare newbies away.
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And this is why Mastodon and Lemmy are too much for your average person.
50% of Linux is being free to choose. The other 50% is knowing what the correct choice is.
The other 50% is knowing what the correct choice* is.
* Notice: whatever choice is made, half the encountered users will say it was the wrong choice.
The Steam Deck uses Arch (btw) and KDE, so that’s what I’ll likely go for eventually since I’m most familiar with them.
Look at all the comments explaining what to pick to an invisible audience. The OP didn’t actually ask a question. 🤭
The same guy was perfectly fine picking his phone brand
The mistake here is not just picking. This is why most people who make the switch just go for the big one. lemmy.world, piefed.social, mastodon.social.
You’re gonna have to pick. Pick a username, pick a password, pick a browser, pick between fuckin Amazon or Alibaba, idk. Using windows is also a choice. But yeah I say just use mint and move on to the next one :)
Unlike lemmy.world, ubuntu isn’t sending propaganda email to explain how Israel isn’t actually doing genocide
I found that https://distrochooser.de/ Idk if it can help anyone but i think that it’s kinda spot on about what i like tbh
Just choose anything. But really, you will be disappointed unless you use KDE on NixOS
If you want to love linux, then pick a distro and love it until you find you’d rather love another. There’s no right answer, just enjoy the journey. And back up your data.
It’s like a partner really
Yep. All of my tools, and by extension all the people who make them, are my partners and I love and appreciate all of them ❤️.
Debian with LXDE is great on computers with older hardware.
tbh I’m boring and just use Ubuntu (with whatever DE they default to, used to be Gnome then they switched to Unity, and now it’s Gnome again, lol) - it makes it easier to find solutions to things because so many other people also use Ubuntu, I want the easiest experience.
I’m with you. I ran Qubes for a while for security reasons, and it was just too much of a pain in the ass. Ubuntu is easy.
There’re only 3 types of people:
- Those who use NixOS
- Those who have skill issues with NixOS
- Those who don’t know NixOS yet
I’m in camp 2 and I’m happy with it
There is a trick to it. Just keep pressing enter.
Just start with Mint. It’s easy enough. Later you’ll be more informed to try something else.
In my case I started with Mint, then Arch/KDE and finally Debian/KDE.
Just pick Mint and get on with your life.
That’s what I did 6 months ago. No issues so far that haven’t been solved by either a quick search or literally just waiting a few days for an update. The games I play work, I don’t depend on any Adobe software so I don’t even need Wine. Computers aren’t my hobby, Mint has let me keep it that way.
If you’re a Linux veteran and this repulses you, that’s fine. This is more for people on Windows who want to jump but are worried.
I do not understand why lemmy is obsessed with this distro
Its got the highest success rate with new users that are not hobbiests. And a good distro to learn Linux on because of all the Ubuntu guides.
It was easy to move relatives to from windows without much effort, have done it multiple times and it ran fine for years with the only issue I had to support was cleaning up a boot partition that filled up after several years of automated updates.
I’m not seeing anything unique to mint. That reads like, “I tried it and it worked”
We’re talking linux. “It just works” is something relatively new lol
Honestly that’s a big part of the fear of changing OS. If it works why something else. Users with specific use cases are rarer.
Me either. I have tried it multiple times over the years and I did not have great luck with things “just working” as everyone claims. Plus I hate the windows style DE UIs so it seems like a weird choice that so many people will recommend it and tout it without even asking follow up questions.
Plus I hate the windows style DE UIs so it seems like a weird choice
The average user hates the changes involved in switching away from the windows distro. The thing you hate about it is an objectively good reason for recommending it to a new user.
I have tried it multiple times over the years and I did not have great luck with things “just working” as everyone claims.
I have used it for several years now (with multiple sets of hardware) with no issues. Every single Linux version is going to have something it can’t handle. Linux mint is stable and handles most stuff just fine. A bad experience is possible anywhere, so this isn’t really a good reason to not recommend it for new users.
I’ve tried many distros. Nothing you’ve said is unique to Mint.
Just don’t use Manjaro.
Yeah I’m not saying it’s the worst distro, I just don’t think my multiple experiences with it remotely align with the reputation.
Regarding the UI, I think people want familiarity and even think they want something with a design like that. But in practice the similarities are only skin deep and to me if they’re already going to need to learn all the ways it differs from windows, why not put the same effort into learning something that also varies superficially from windows (just in a different way than mint)?
I think the real reason people recommend mint is, while deep down they know users will have a better time on Ubuntu, they cannot stand the idea of recommending that company’s product directly.
Every single Linux version is going to have something it can’t handle. Linux mint is stable and handles most stuff just fine.
If you’d like to know that Mint can’t handle…
*raises hand*
6 monitors connected to 2 GPUs – one old Radeon and one 3090. I tried Mint and it could not handle that setup, no matter what I tried doing to it. Currently on Ubuntu, which worked with that setup right out of the box, no tweaking necessary.
I have tried it multiple times over the years and I did not have great luck with things “just working” as everyone claims.
This is why I don’t like recommending LTS distros for anything other than servers. The Linux kernel and desktop software moves fast these days, and running 2 year old kernel and DE means missing out on the fixes and improvements that the “it just works” people are talking about.
Yup. People need to understand that “stable” is not a synonym for bug-free.
As you said, DEs in particularly move so fast that the rare bug that makes it through and is subsequently quickly fixed is much less problematic than sometimes years of missing features and longstanding bugs that don’t get backported.
If you are recommending a first time Linux user a distro, the goal isn’t to find the perfect one tailored for them, the goal is to get them to use Linux and not have a bad experience, putting a bunch of upfront conditions on choice is overloading
Distro hoping can happen later
I think the obsession part you are referring to isn’t their love for Mint or them regarding it as the best distro. It’s like someone asking which direction they should take to drive somewhere, there’s a sea of people responding with different routes with tiny differences and the Linux Mint response would be “Whatever the GPS decided”
Really wanted to try the Debian version of mint, but unfortunately it’s systemd based
It’s the objectively correct choice, but it might draw the ire of Fedora stans.
The only reason I dislike mint is because the developers kept postponing the Wayland transition so insanely long. Once it does HDR, variable refresh rate, and fractional scaling on heterogeneous displays correctly, I’ll start recommending it again.
Wayland: display server. The thing that shows the visual stuff on screen. Wayland=new and more features (features explained below). X11=old but stable and takes time to transition from without bugs.
HDR: high dynamic range. If you have a really nice TV or monitor, this gives you better color accuracy. Make sure you have good brightness levels with brightness cranked up, or it will counter intuitively look worse, like the brown filter PS3 era of video games.
VRR: variable refresh rate. When you run a game, some parts are harder to render than others due to increased detail and things happening in the screen. Thus, your frame rate will dip, making a noticeable jittery effect that is not smooth, especially if you have a high refresh rate monitor. My monitor refreshes 165 times per second to detect changes, and if the frame rate goes from 140 frames generated to 90, that is very noticeable. VRR syncs the refresh rate of your monitor to the GPU itself, so it knows exactly how many frames it will be getting. My monitor will refresh 90 times for that second that I got a frame drop instead of 165, which drastically decreases the jittery effect of the dropped frames. You can still kind of tell, but it is more smooth and responsive in terms of what is happening on screen.
Heterogeneous displays: monitors of different resolutions.
Fractional scaling: this allows you to set display zoom at different percentages on different monitors, as well as setting non-integer scaling (integer is 100% to 200%, non integer is 100% to 125%). This is important because 100% scaling is often too small on high resolutions, and 200% is comically large. Also for the multiple monitor scenario, most people have a new monitor and their old monitor as the secondary. For example, 4k will require 150% scaling at least to be readable st most screen sizes. 1080p will look too zoomed in at over 100%, and not match the look of the other monitor.
In summary, most of this is going to matter only if you are a gamer or watch HDR content like movies on your computer. Having matching monitors despite non matching resolutions is pretty nice though. But if you have matching monitors or 1 monitor it doesn’t matter either. Hence, Mint is not a good choice for a gaming or home theater situation, but its hyper focus on being stable makes everyone else like it more because they never do anything different unless it is for sure going to work. At this point though, most distros are using Wayland with no issues.
Love seeing Clone High memes in the wild.
Was just reminiscing the theme song a couple days back.
Linux is like the knork of the OS world, it does it all.
It’s better to delay it and release an immediately usable product than to break the desktop when an unexpected bug is encountered and make the computer unusable. I’ve never transitioned a desktop environment and framework to an entirely different display system, but I don’t imagine it’s as simple as flipping a switch.
Mint is not a bleeding edge distro. Reliability should come first, always.
It definitely takes time, and stable distros should exist. Wayland has been the clear choice moving forward for 7 years though. It feels like Mint & a few others are just stalling at this point.
HDR is like the only reason I’m on Windows 11. Already switched my entire home lab over to proxmox.
What would you recommend today if I wanted good HDR support and gaming with a Radeon GPU?
Or should I just wait for Mint to get those features?
Most anything that used KDE or GNOME will use all Wayland features. Every once in a while some distros with GNOME won’t but I forget who and they may have fixed it by now. KDE has better customization and looks more like Mint/Windows by default so I’d stick with that personally.
I use Fedora KDE. It gets more updates than Ubuntu based stuff but nowhere near what rolling distros like Arch do. It’s a very well documented “regular person” distro. I like their package manager better than apt. Can still use KDE Discover for just about any app installation. Downsides: you have to install Nvidia drivers manually, and sign them + your Secure Boot keys if you want to use Secure Boot. Not relevant to you though.
Bazzite is Fedora Atomic but with additional gaming tweaks. Atomic/immutable means you can’t break it, but also aren’t supposed to/can’t install native packages and drivers yourself. But Bazzite gives you everything you need from the jump like drivers. Also Secure Boot needs Universal Blue’s signature I think which isn’t too hard but you will have to look it up. You must use flatpaks only.
Cachy OS is Arch but with a sane installer that walks you through everything in GUI. It has even more optimizations than Bazzite, and is #1 for gaming. It also holds back updates slightly from regular Arch, so breaking happens less often. But it’s still “basically” a rolling distro, so breakage may happen. You pretty much have to use their app store instead of KDE Discover or whatnot. No Secure Boot.
Overall Fedora and Bazzite are both easy to medium difficulty at worst, but for different reasons. Cachy is medium difficulty but best at gaming & general performance optimization.
Enough posts about Wayland are complaints I don’t care if it ever happens. Mint works fucking great just like it is.
For some variety, I recently switched from x11 to Wayland and it fixed some problems I was having with game input.
Only?!
Are we pretending 2 years old software is a good thing?
We are not pretending. Debugged and working reliably is better than new. Being new is not automatically useful value.
I’m old and remember the string of hacks early on. I think the ISO server hack was made public for those interested.
what do you recommend now?
For me it was the objectively incorrect choice. Sound issues, display issues, slow. Whatever is up with mint, it absolutely doesn’t work with my hardware.
It didn’t work on my laptop either. I moved on to another Ubuntu derivative that didn’t have that problem.
It’s possible to install a newer kernel in Mint using the Update Manager. This might have solved your hardware issues. Admittedly, though, this option is not very easy to find if you’re not aware of it.
It’s also kinda antithetical to what people are saying, which is that mint is great out of the box.
Yeah, ideally the Mint installer or Driver Manager or whatever would be smart enough to tell you “some of your hardware is not supported by the default kernel, click here to install a kernel that will support your hardware”. This is definitely a shortcoming in Linux Mint.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that it is possible to get Mint running right on most hardware without touching a terminal.
Personally I’d recommend a beginner try running Mint or another stable distribution with a newer kernel before trying some sort of cutting edge rolling release, which might be buggy. But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
Nixos is the objectively correct choice if anything.
objectively
I don’t think you understand meaning of that word
Oh god, no. Are you trying to drive people away from using Linux?
Mint noobs : Haha entry level distro go brr
Fedora wearers : Noooo milady you have to use a version of an OS based off corporate bsRHEL is downstream from Fedora. They’re both forks of Red Hat, but Red Hat ≠ RHEL
Edit: also, since you wanna fuckin go there, Linux Mint is downstream from Ubuntu, which is corporate BS. So you’re making accusations in a mirror.
Me: At least my neighbors aren’t those inbred hicks over there
You : Actually, those people have only practiced cousin marriage, which has been socially acceptable for various centuries
Me : Yeah, the point is more that they are hicks.Yeah what’s wrong with familishagging? They know what you like
What the fuck? Not sure whether that’s more strawman or red herring, but either way it’s a really cheap deflection that provides a window into your mind, not mine.
Is that how you respond to everyone who points out why you’re wrong?
idk look through my history and find out.
Mint/mate 😁
Yeah, if you hit a snag you can pursue other options but best just to dive into something easy to get started on.
