I’ve been toying with Linux on and off for almost 20 years now.
Started with damnsmalllinux on some ancient 600mhz Thinkpads. Dual booted Ubuntu for a long time, back when 3d desktop cubes were all the rage, so I’m used to gnome, synaptic and apt.
Tried to stick with it, but never could get away from Windows entirely. Especially for gaming, and a few critical apps. Eventually I kind of drifted away, and went full Windows for years. I always keep an Ubuntu LTS thumb drive around, and would use it occasionally for various reasons, testing etc etc.
Recently I installed Ubuntu 24.04, and had tons of stability issues. Mostly involving video output and the GUI. Screen would jitter left and right a few pixels. And sometimes maximized windows would be transparent to clicks, so you’d be clicking random stuff below the window. This was especially bad with Firefox and VLC, separately. I also had issues with removable drives not mounting properly. Standard stuff, I wasn’t doing anything weird. Practically a fresh install.
So I tried Mint, cinnamon. And so far I really like it! I’ve not been running it daily, but just the same tinkering. And so far no issues at all. But that got me thinking, what else am I missing?
I’m comfortable in the command line, but not proficient, I appreciate a good GUI for most things.
I plan to do some gaming, so steam proton compatibility is important. I don’t think that’s hard to achieve, but I wanted to make sure, it’s important to me.
Last time I played with KDE was a decade ago, I hear there’s lots of new developments going on there? In plasma? Unless plasma is different now, IDK I haven’t looked extremely hard.
I don’t care much about customization, I don’t want arch. I want something that is a pretty solid base, with decent features, and good support for when this go sideways. I feel like that’s not Ubuntu anymore. Especially with them pushing into Wayland and flat packs.
I guess my question is, does Mint seem like a good distro to start with? Or am I not looking hard enough?
Thanks!
Mint Cinnamon has been great for me.
It is fully featured right out of the box and is a great drop-in replacement for windows. I will without a doubt use it when upgrading family members who are about to lose win10 support.
It is based off the popular Debian -> Ubuntu distros, and is very popular itself. This is good when it comes to quickly finding existing answers to specific questions. And of course they disabled the iffy stuff from ubuntu (snaps) while supporting flatpak.
I’m a software engineer who uses the command line all day, and I use Mint at work and at home. You see, even though the distro is a polished, full featured, and “easy” option, it is still Linux. So it is not locked down and you can still do what you want with your computer.
It won’t teach you to configure your system from the ground up like Arch might, instead it starts you off in a complete well-configured state and you can leave it alone or change it.
I recently made the switch from Windows to Linux on my gaming desktop and it’s been a nearly flawless transition. I’ve been running Pop_OS without problems. If you have an AMD video card you might want to check Bazzite for a gaming oriented Linux distro. Any distro should allow you to use a different desktop, so which GUI to use is up to you. KDE Plasma has a lot of skins to choose from and is a pretty easy transition from Windows. You don’t even have to stick with a single desktop environment. I currently choose between the default Pop_OS or Plasma depending on my mood or use case.
Mint is amazing and frankly if its working for you then I think you’ve found it. I stayed on mint for a long time until I relented to a nagging friend and tried out NIxOS and was amazed. If you have the technical skills and feel confident to push through the inital difficulty its well well worth it.
So whats the good?
- Reproducibility. Ever been annoyed that someone cant help you because they either dont have the time or just cant reproduce the problem? Its no longer an issue. Dependancy is managed by design so configuration and state is transferable with as little as only two files.
- Declarative. Best way to decibe this is all the benefits of Arch and zero of the problems. Declare your configuration in a file and then have a life. Ive never saved so much time before with any distro. Imaging installing windows, configuring the OS, installing apps, configuring them only once, ever, never having to do that again. Reinstalls go straight back to the way you like it.
- Reliable. Ive never had a linux distro so stable. The risk and pain of change is a thing of the past.
- Largest and most up to date repo. Its simply unmatched.
- The list goes on to other areas like security, scalability and much more but lets leave it there.
Whats the bad?
- Difficulty of entry. You need to have basic understanding on writting basic code to some degree as you define your config as a simple text file. I recommend vimjoyer on youtube he has some great simple intro videos that will help here.
- Using apps not in the repo. You will need to step up your config skills here to install that weird app you want. That is only unless you cant wait. If you have time the community is fantastic, a quick app request on the repo has a great chance of being picked up by some legend and added to the repo officially.
- The wiki, its no Arch wiki, thankfully you dont really need it. The community maintains a bunch of configs for hardware and apps on the repo which is weirdly not advertised half as much as it should be. Alternatively just search github for configs from other nixians.
Mint is fine. Rather than changing distros, rather keep using it and configuring it the way you want it. For the most part, GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux and many popular distributions are largely the same.
My personal recommendations: Fedora KDE, Nobara or Linux Mint. You can’t go wrong with either one of them.
Thanks for the recommendations! Lots of Fedora in here, I feel bad for never having checked it out.
Fedora kde spin here with 4080 super. 5 mins to set up the nvidia driver and steam, no issues for like 1-2 years
I’m really thinking I might go Fedora. I haven’t spun any of these up yet, busy busy.
My new laptop is a framework 13, AMD version. Apparently bluefin, which is Fedora based, is super compatible with all the features of that laptop.
I don’t know much about the other distros but Fedora is a happy medium between bleeding edge features in arch and waiting 10 years. It’s also one of the few distros that support HDR And HDR gaming
Thanks! I’m actually settling into bluefin right now. It’s based on Fedora, but is closer to bazzite. Supposedly has great framework support, which is important I realized
I use mint on my daily-driver/gaming-rig/mediaserver. I’ve been a Linux user for 20 years, eventually you just want a normal distro with sane defaults. Mint is wonderful.
I am at 15 years and couldn’t agree more about having a distro with sane defaults. Mint is my 2nd choice behind Fedora.
I wish Fedora worked for me, something about it just doesn’t run right on my lappy and I like to have the same distro on all my machines so it’s a nogo across the board for me.
I like Fedora, it’s nice, it just absolutely won’t play nice with my macbook and I’m not gonna get a new laptop just for better Fedora support when this 14 year old hunk’o’junk still works perfectly with mint.
