When Windows 10 dies, I am going to jump ship over to Linux. Which version would you recommend for someone with zero prior experience with Linux? **Edit: Linux Mint it shall be.**
Whom also likes to game every now and then ;)
Edit: Thank you all for your input and suggestions! Linux Mint shall be my next OS! Though, I think I’ll give Pop!OS a look-see as well.
Pop!OS. It is maintained by a company called System76 who make Linux computers. You might think about getting one if you want a new computer. Support the cause!
I will second Pop!OS. I have it installed on my gaming desktop and have been very satisfied with its stability and ability to play every game I’ve wanted to. Between Steams Proton layer and Wine (with the wineglass GUI) there is nothing I want for right now.
(I do run an AMD card, YMMV with an Nvidia one as I cannot speak to experience with that).
I do use Mint for my laptop/daily driver outside of gaming and love that as well. In my mind the two distributions fit the use cases well.
Ease of installation would be a huge one. Pop was run the installer from USB and go. After it was online there was just installing steam and whatever games I wanted. I have not dug further into void or what its capable of. I wanted as little fiddling as possible. To me the interface felt good out of the box.
I mainly sought out Pop!OS after reading about people’s experience with it and gaming and liked what I heard. I jumped directly from windows 11 to Pop. If void works for you, that’s awesome. This was my “how do I get it running now without messing around” moment. I really just wanted to game, immediately after install. Later on I started to fiddle with things.
Pretty happy with my Lemur Pro, 3.5 years in. I just replaced the battery, which was fairly painless. Also had to replace the wireless radio, which was as easy as popping in a new one. I wasn’t happy that it failed, but apparently that’s industry wide, not just these laptops. Replacement was like $35. Other than that I’ve only had cosmetic issues, like the System76 sticker came off, which I don’t care about.
I game, like a lot, and if windows beats me one more time i swear I’ll leave them for good. Is there a list of supported games? I just hit their site and only saw an nvidia gpx drivers too, did i simple miss the AMD stuff?
Intel and AMD drivers are part of the Linux kernel so you never need to think about drivers.
Check out https://www.protondb.com/ for something of a list of supported games, but generally most games just work (in Steam, go to Settings, Compatibility, and check the box for applying Proton on all games in library and not just the officially supported ones).
ProtonDB isn’t a complete list, but if you do struggle with getting a game to work, chances are somebody has posted a string you can paste into Steam to make the game magically work.
to add on to this, generally the only games that have issues are games with pretty serious anti cheat, and even many of those will still work. protondb will reflect this of course, but if you already know you mostly only play single player or cooperative titles, you can save a lot of time looking through your library
I appreciate what glorious eggroll does. And I’ve had no issues with the few games I’ve played on Steam.
I’ve been running Nobara for several months and it has been very stable though I find it is lacking a little polish around the edges in some areas. Kind of like how Mint was when I first started about 10y ago.
I’m trying out Fedora now for a while. On kernel 6.5. I was on 6.1 in Nobara. I have one game that’s crashing now (it wasn’t crashing in Nobara … go figure). So I may have to go back to Nobara or try to figure out what they did with Nobara vs Fedora that would help.
When Mint gets to kernel 6.x some day, I might jump back. (5.19 doesn’t support my GPU). Overall Mint became very polished. I hardly ever ran into weird issues. Although I do remember feeling Cinnamon blew up every so often.
I think it depends on what you are looking for. While Linux Mint is a safe option, it does have some drawbacks… well it’s more drawbacks from Ubuntu but as Linux Mint is based off of it, it’s also impacted. Primarily the fact that Ubuntu packages are terribly out of date. Thankfully mint makes adding PPA’s painless, but for apps that don’t have a PPA it’s a pain to install them from scratch like Mangohud. It’s not impossible, but there is an expect level of Linux knowledge which is required before going in.
Another option is Manjaro. You will hear the litany of endless criticism about it from the community, some of it is valid. But for the most part, while it’s not as nice as Linux Mint, I think the OS will get you to the point where you can start using your machine faster. Mostly thanks to Arch’s rolling release, as well as the AUR for filling the gap between official packages and flatpaks.
I was using Manjaro for the longest time, but switched to Mint due to a freak bootloader accident. I prefer Manjaro in terms of how well it handled Games and Windows software due to it’s association with Arch. But I like how well Mint manages my laptop’s battery and performance or lack thereof due to it’s pitiful cooler.
Keep in mind they have zero Linux experience so I doubt they’ll be needing packages that are too obscure for mint, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to run windows software in Linux to a novice.
While I agree, the issue is, that they’ll want to. Thankfully Valve is handling games well enough right now that it’s a non problem. Regardless which distro you are on.
Its not advised to install steam os on non steamdeck devices. Pop os, nobara and Garuda I believe come configured for gaming out of the box and are pretty uptodate.
please please please avoid an LTS (long term support) distro for desktop use, especially if gaming. this includes Linux mint which is based on Ubuntu LTS. the packages are painfully old and cause problems playing the latest games, particularly where they don’t work out of the box with lutris/proton/wine etc. LTS is great for servers and workstations but not end users
experienced users can make any distro work including LTS but it’s extra overhead for new folks
It’s not about Laptop vs worksation. It’s about how new is the Hardware compared to the Linux Kernel shipping with the LTS distribution. If your hardware is older than the kernel, you will most likely not have any problems. For example, let’s say you use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, which ships with Kernel 5.17 releaed in may 2022, if your computer is made of parts released in 2021, no problem.
OP, this is terrible advice. Do not follow! Unless you run into a problem with Ubuntu LTS or distro based on it that you and the community cannot solve and it’s due to the LTS, stick with LTS. The vast majority of users are on LTS which is why there are tested solutions for most common problems you might run into. LTS releases last for many years so once you solve a problem, it’s likely you won’t have to solve it again for a long time, unless you decide to make your life more interesting by upgrading or changing the OS. Non-LTS releases last for 9 months or so, then you’re thrust onto a new set of changes and bugs that may or may not hit you, with much fewer comrades to test them and find solutions for. As a new user, if you’re going with Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based OS, stick to LTS. You’ll have enough hurdles to cross getting acquainted with the OS itself.
my lug tries to help people trying to run lutris on old LTS versions and for one example we ended up having to tell them to use some .deb for lutris since ubuntu shipped a broken lutris version for a year or whatever users should always be able to depend on their package manager alone instead of side loading content. even had instances of their version of wget or curl being incompatible with winetricks and gitlab and githubs apis
Being able to always rely on the package manager alone, in other words on the built-in repos alone, has never been achievable on a stable system. You have to throw stability out of the window to allow for that to happen. There are huge downsides to that, especially for new users who have no clue how to isolate and work around defects. That’s why sideloading content via third party repos or individual debs has always been a part of the reality of Debian-based OSes. As a result, most open source communities and proprietary vendors provide one or the other.
Personally I use Debian stable but I’d recommend starting with Ubuntu if you are new. I’m using linux fulltime since 2008 if that makes any difference.
The reason is you are guaranteed to find support for a program if there is a linux version.
Most of the instructions online have specific Ubuntu instructions.
The default install is quite user friendly.
You will have access to more packages than many other linux distros. You still have flatpak too if your desired package is not in the Ubuntu repository ( or snap store).
You can always pick a different one later once you have some experience under your belt.
Doing this you will be able to become familiar with APT the Debian package manager. Used in Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian and other Debian derivatives.
Getting the concepts here you can then just learn the differences if you switch distro such to an RPM (Different package format) based distro such as fedora.
In short use Ubuntu for now. Experiment and read up about it so you can build your knowledge. We are a community that like to share and learn. Also as a general rule backup your files before you install it and after you have set it up how you want. You can easily just copy the whole home directory for this 😉
The distro doesnt matter but it should not get in your way. They can all be made to look and act the same for the most part. The focus should be on knowledge. Linux is like digital Lego you can pick and choose the parts you like and layer them together.
Nearly all Ubuntu instructions also apply to Debian.
Flatpak is no longer default on Ubuntu since they see it as competition.
As of Debian Bookworm, nonfree firmware is available on the installation media and no further steps are involved.
Ubuntu used to be the most friendly beginner experience. I’m not sure if it has any advantage over Debian today.
Great advice substantiated by clear reasoning. I second it. More specifically, grab Ubuntu LTS. Going with an Ubuntu LTS based distro might present some extra challenges but it would probably be fine too.
Ubuntu is great for the reasons outlined and it provides an obvious path to Debian, should you want to move away from it in the future.
Ubuntu, mint, fedora, Manjaro are all pretty much in the same class, and it’s largely irrelevant which you pick. They’re all supported, have decent UI for most of what you want to do, and have good documentation for how to do it.
It’s not too difficult to change distros without having to move all your data once you’re switched, so it doesn’t matter too much, and you’ll probably try a couple before finding the one with the best menus for you.
I would recommend endeavor over manjaro. Manjaro has issues with the aur.
And I’d recommended if either of these are your first foray into linux, then dual boot with a windows install still functioning (because a noobie will break arch once or twice)
This is not distro specific advice but: when starting out you can use a virtual machine like VMware to test drive Linux without having to repartition your drive. VMware is free for individual non commercial use.
I would unironically recommend arch to anyone who has a large steam library, and id recommend KDE Plasma as the desktop. Valve uses Arch as a base, and KDE as their desktop mode environment, so a lot of games on steam are tested in this environment via proton.
I would not recommend it to newcomers to start with, but as a “learn about linux and work your way towards arch” type of ordeal. Arch would be the endgoal, not the starting line.
You need to first understand what kind of interaction you expect with your OS. For this, you can start by considering what you use your OS for and currently what you do for your OS. e.g. Before I jumped to Linux, I was just starting to learn PowerShell on Win, because I saw a lot of places in my system where I wanted to use it. I felt consistently dissatisfied with the lack of things I could just tell the system to do, making me go to scripting. This way, I knew I won’t have a problem with putting time into something that takes a lot of configuring. But since I was still new and wanted an easy start, I went with Manjaro KDE. It was based on Arch, but had a system of differed updates, giving me a feel of it being easier. Plus, it had a lot of customisations out of the box, some of which, I learnt from, when making my own configurations for EndeavourOS. EndeavourOS considers itself to be more terminal oriented, and it is possible to easily get a full-fledged tty system, just by selecting it in the installer. I chose KDE because I like changing the Appearance a lot, but you might want to look at other DEs depending upon your expectations.
Ubuntu has been shifting a lot to snaps, so if you want your computer to be snappy (the literal meaning), you might want to avoid it (ironically). But at the same time, if you want less configuration requirements and want to keep most of your exp outside the terminal, on top of finding it easier to install software from vendors’ websites, you can consider it. If you are fine with putting in the minimal amount of brain usage it takes to understand the installation instructions of the website - and by that I mean, read the heading telling you which distro the copy-paste text is meant for (I know ppl too lazy to do that and trying paste an apt command into Red Hat) - I suggest Fedora/Linux Mint and a slew of others.
DE = Desktop Environment apt = Package Manager (kinda like an app store on terminal) used for Ubuntu
P.S.: If you choose an Arch-based distro, make sure you keep a backup OS that is in the Debian/Fedora tree. I keep a Debian KDE, mainly for older linux games, which ask for packages that have been long removed from Arch, but it is useful in case you break something. That way you won’t have to wait for the time it takes to make a Live USB and can just restart.
You can always start sooner and dual boot on Linux Mint to get familiar test your usecases. I have been dual booting and haven’t logged into Windows in over 6 months. Gaming is pretty good for many games on Linux.
Add comment