That's okay. Thanks to their insane pricing caused by covid, followed by more insane pricing caused by the AI bubble, many people are still running cards not getting any new drivers anyway.
I changed one of my PCs over to Debian this month, and I was surprised at how smooth it is. I guess I was expecting it to be way more barebones. I don't know if I need more than this!
I dislike ubuntu. I don't care about ppa since i'll just compile anything not in the repos. Same with drivers but i haven't needed any weird driver in years.
If you are happy with Debian, I'd say stay with it. I have tried many distros but I like Debian and return to it for most of my devices. Sometimes Debian will have older versions of software if you use stable, I don't really mind personally
Thats what LMDE is for, Linux Mint Debian Edition. Been my daily driver for years. Otherwise I use vanilla Debian for all my server and headless stuff.
Arch is on my gaming pc and is alot of fun, but I must admit my old reliable is straight Debian, after hopping through a couple of Debian based distros, I tried straight deb and agree it just works. So it's installed on anything I don't wanna tinker with
I've been living with fedora (ultramarine) kde for a while now because people praised fedora so much, but i think mint still wins. and i chose ultramarine because am a noob, don't sue me.
there are many little things that just don't work and i seriously can't figure out. here's a few: discover fails to update the system and i always have to do it manually from the terminal. wine is broken, it literally can't run anything i throw at it that worked on mint. plasma theme customization is somewhat broken (also custom themes prevent updating...). using alt key in games run with wine causes some annoying notification sound (not in system keyboard shortcuts). often keyboard leds stay on when system suspended, system can't be woken up from keyboard. can't use flameshot with kb shortcut.
this isn't a hate comment though, a lot of things are better than i had with mint cinnamon. i do like how it's a lot faster than mint when under heavy load, autosuspend actually works, no issues with screen not waking up. currently my media pc with mint can't update because all sources are unavailable and it has some conflict with python3 which it won't let me uninstall (which i suspect would be unwise, idk)
I found CachyOS while trying to figure out the best OS for my handheld. Was on bazzite before that. I ended up loving it so much I installed it on my laptop and desktop too.
Mint has been glazed since the beginning of time. Not a single laptop or computer I have ever owned has worked out of the box with it. As opposed to alternatives like Ubuntu or Fedora. I must be the single most unlucky person in the history of Linux.
Is there any company out there that sells PCs with Linux pre-installed? I make a ton of money selling custom built PCs that have Linux pre-installed and tested.
And to clarify, it's pretty much only Ubuntu that is the Linux option with the standard SI's. And I'm pretty sure it's standard Ubuntu with gnome, not Kubuntu or being able to select a different DE, etc.
So it's an option...but not something I'd seek out from Dell or HP specifically.
I usually build my own PCs, or I buy certified refurbished systems from eBay, so I usually don't pay the Windows tax(or its baked in).
But definitely a good option to get something for cheaper, I do wish more systems had a Linux or no OS option.
And even if I plan to use Windows on a system, I usually re-install Windows anyway. Can't be too careful with what has already been installed on something.
I dual boot anyway so it doesn’t really matter and as shitty as MS is i find having it to be valuable nonetheless but i suppose it’s trivial to just run activation scripts
Most distros works out of the box with that weirdly enough, only one I've had issues with was debian and the pen, but that worked itself out straight away after updating it
Sorta same, but my problems expand beyond just Mint... I had a lot of problems with Ubuntu several years back, so I was convinced to switch to Manjaro. That was an absolutely unabashed fucking nightmare. I thought I was either cursed or just too stupid for Linux for a while. I still don't know if I just got very unlucky or if I was/am too stupid for the distros that everyone shouts praises from the rooftops for... I stumbled into Garuda Linux and it has been a dream come true.
In the past 5 years I've only ever had minor issues*, like a power button light not being on. But as a developer, I'm aware my hardware choices are more likely to be popular with other developers who would have already noticed and fixed issues.
As someone who runs a small volunteer run IT support group that tries to suggest Linux I've found that I often need the Ubuntu PPA to get Qualcomm WiFi cards to work.
There is no one reliable distro. Mint, itself is based off Ubuntu and also releases LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
If reliablility is measured in terms of how stable a distro is, then likely Debian with it's conservative approach to packaging updates comes to mind (No wonder large number of distros are based off Debian only).
I would even argue as long as someone isn't messing with a niche distro such as KDE Neon( meant to showcase KDE packages) or Linuxfx (or whatever it has renamed itself to, one of the few shady ones IMO ) or Trisquel OS (a GNU certified distro where running into dependency hell isn't new); it will suit user's case.
Debian, Slackware, Void, Zorin, even rolling release like Arch (basically any one that meets the user's use case is reliable)
I would even argue as long as someone isn’t messing with a niche distro such as KDE Neon
KDE Neon is dead because its developers found out that putting an add-on repository on top of Ubuntu is not reliable at all. That's why KDE Linux is now in development.
Is there a writeup about their problems with Ubuntu? Adding repositories to Debian and/or Ubuntu is how plenty of software is distributed, so I'm surprised to hear they're unhappy with it.
Probably because you use a client that tries to open the link locally. OP deleted the post and that's why Lemmy cannot open its comments any longer, hence the Mastodon link that works fine in a web browser.
Do you know which software it is that is/was in the universe repo?
Pretty much everything except the base OS and Gnome.
Well, context is everything. Obviously there’s no single best distro for all use cases.
This is a 13 year old MacBook Pro, with ancient Linux-hating hybrid Nvidia/Intel graphics that needs an NVRAM modification and vga_switcheroo to do things like video acceleration properly.
And not my main computer, just for learning Linux and playing some old games.
So Endeavour worked great, but seemed like ultimately a computer that old is probably best off with stability and minimal updates rather than being bleeding-edge and subjecting it to gigabytes of updates each week.
I absolutely loved the release of LMDE, it's just what I like though, the simple intuitive interface of Mint, without dealing with Canonical's bullshit (really sour about snaps, ignore me lol).
Edit: picked back up my phone and reread what was on the screen when I realized you probably meant desktop environment and not Debian Edition when you typed DE.
I think I'm just old enough, have fiddled with my PC enough times in the past, have enough other shit to do, and get enough coding and troubleshooting experience at work that I look at the quest to find my spirit distro and think "that's a youngster's game."
Or, you know, maybe Mint is already my spirit distro and I am experienced enough to not fix what isn't broken!
I am still into some tech and "new computer" type stuff. I am about to install a bigger/faster drive in my PC and set up my Home Assistant server. That PC is already my Jellyfin server. I am also in the middle of building a brand new PC for my kid, which will also run Mint, lol.
But I spend time only on the things that I've learned really matter to me, and not on all the things you're "supposed to" mess with in your home lab that you obviously have.
You know the meme (or meme category) where it's a resume or linkedin profile where the recent work history goes something like Senior Network Architect, then Goose Farmer?
I may literally have a 3D printer still in the box, and PC & networking parts all over the house, but my daily routine is embedded linux C/C++ sr developer by day and animal tender on the evenings and weekends, lol.
Features (e.g. USE flags, different inits, musl, package manager speed, newness vs stability, different core utils, etc)
Reliability
Education
Community
But yeah... It's a mite silly to be distro-hopping just to try different desktop environments.
Methinks several still-new users are yet to realise the desktop environment and distro are not tied together, and nearly all distros offer nearly all desktop environments to install, just one command away.
I had already converted my home manager configuration into normal config files and was using Home Manager just to manage symlinks.
I was using Nix for system configuration but that doesn't mean that I forgot how to set up a Linux system by more conventional methods (it's like learning how to ride a bike). While I do like the declarative aspect, doing everything in one language didn't appeal anymore after over a year of using NixOS...
Also, I wanted a package manager that told me what packages would be updated, and which let me search packages from the command line easily... Nix didn't provide that and it was annoying me.
I do miss flake.nix or shell.nix files and Nix shells though. But XBPS (Void's package manager) has its fair share of cool things as well and seems easier to understand, which is a bonus.
Just delete the configuration.nix file along with all backups of it and its easy to not look back. At least that did it for me since my system needed specific boot settings to even work and relearning all that wasn't worth it.
except it doesn't. Fixed release model quite easily gets in a way of doing shit. Need to add a PPA into config for each separate package you need the latest release of, or simply because the package itself is absent in the normal repo doesn't help either. And don't get me started on troubleshooting after "doing shit".
Something like fedora does a much better job if you prefer fixed release, but if you like to experiment and "do shit", arch derivatives like Endeavor or Cachy are just better suited for you. All of the above also have a much nicer documentation than Mint.
well, it apparently was an issue for me on Mint, when i just switched from windows.
I might misremember things, but i believe some Microsoft stuff was inside PPA, so for someone just switching from windows it's actually more likely to delve into the apt fuckery.
Well, I switched to Linux to get away from Microsoft bullshit so I never tried installing any of their stuff but I can see that being an issue for some people.
I also had the same experience with Mint having outdated packages. And at that time I was a Linux noob so I figured I'd just wait until Mint updated their shit.
Well days turned into weeks and then about 3 months later, still with no updates from Mint, I jumped ship to Fedora. Which Fedora was nice but then I hopped to Kubuntu and now I'm on CachyOS.
I see all of this Mint hype and while I do love Cinnamon; I would never put Mint on my own devices going forward. It's definitely a distro I would put on my mom's laptop or a grandparent's device. But their release schedule is abhorrent.
Unironically my most headache-free Linux experience in 10+ years. The handful of times an update doesn't go through you just need to visit the homepage and follow the manual intervention steps outlined in the announcement.
I know CachyOS, at least, shows recent Arch announcements during the update process before installing anything. Unfortunately there's been a recurring DDoS attack on Arch's servers for months, so this check tends to fail and you aren't always notified of breaking changes.
I cannot count the number of times Debian Upgrade broke on me. My memory tells me I had issues with all upgrades (on various machines with mostly defaults) since Debian 8. It’s 13 now. I did follow the correct upgrade process and quite familiar with it, yet every single time I had issues at least for some of the desktops of my elder relatives and friends that I managed. Arch was just stable. And manual intervention is usually needed only if you have this particular thing installed. So, quite seldom. For servers, I think that was much better for me, but now I’m either Arch or Fedora (for situations where I don’t bother with setting my personal environment).
Back then it was for many simply the first rolling distro they tried... to suddenly realize that without tedious (and rarely unproblematic) release upgrades the reasons for a new install (thus trying out yet another distro) also vanished.
I have reinstalled Arch on the same machine only once, after SSD of my super old MacBook Air got corrupted. I haven’t used the laptop for like five years. Weirdly, a reinstall went well, and it looks like the SSD works well so far. Apart from that, my oldest system is about 7 years old, and it’s running well. I have no reason to reinstall. That very machine is a server. Also, I had a MacBook Pro broke keyboard on me, I simply rsynced my entire system to another MacBook Pro, and was done within about two hours. Needed to update /etc/fstab and maybe something else too. So, apart from Arch becoming a bit of a meme, I cannot recommend it more. It taught me quite a lot too. It was mostly stable for me.
A lot of people seem to feel like this. It's obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.
And it's always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.
I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don't tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.
We are just getting into this. One kid has been heavily using lmms the last couple of months. It is very limited but perfect for him composiing game music.
Other family just do basic editing with ardour. We want to level up a bit. Just bought a reaper licence and have been playing with it and a midi controller and some plugins.
Bitwig also looks very nice and seems easy to use.
We are newbs with this stuff. Normally I like to only use free and open source only but both reaper and bitwig feel like pretty good value.
I guess average people are not opinionated about desktop environments. they got familiar with one, and it's fine to them, they're not even thinking about trying something else.
Yes, I understand that GNOME (3+) has a place in Linux/*nix world and that, from a common user's perspective, it might be enough or even more intuitive than Windows and MacOS ever were. Blind hating never helped anyone, especially in FOSS.
For me, as someone outside the common user's realm, the weird aftertaste of internal dev drama and their decisions which features are "needed" and which are not needed (server-side decorations, tray-items, etc.) deter me from using GNOME more than the annual one-month tryout ("Maybe it isn't that limiting to me as I thought?").
Debian is my favorite as well. I prefer KDE, though, because it is pretty. I also don't get the GNOME hate, I just don't love it as much and at this point KDE is way more familiar.
The interface looks more recent. Also I can use Wayland, as X11 can be a pain with scaling or specific setups
Apart from that, there are good default apps (although you can download KDE's stuff anyways), KDE is pretty transparent as an organization. Things like notifications are more sexy than cinnamon. Built in options like Win+P showing screen display works just like windows
Good animations, a good range of default widgets and taskbar config for my needs (it’s pretty limited imo but it’s enough for me)
Terminal is great but I got some problems like .sh scripts not showing a window but just running in background when double clicked. Apart from that, Kate (default editor), Konsole (terminal) are well built
They also have built in support for Nextcloud sync icons in the file browser, which is nice
I prefer the update manager of Mint but no big deal (can’t update only one package in KDE's GUI)
Things like managing battery and connecting to Bluetooth devices is beautiful. Everything feels premium, fast, sleek.
this. im so sick of everyone just telling new people to get mint. cinnamon isnt the best choice for every new person. i hate that its just told to every new person, point blank.
The main reason was that I have a tuxedo laptop, but they also adopted the same moves as mint: mirrored Ubuntu’s repos for privacy, and disabled snap by default. Also, moved ping/internet connectivity check to their own server.
I do believe the packages are a bit outdated but same problem on Mint
I think KDE Neon is more up to date with the packages but still use the default servers, so Canonical gets some of your pings
Btw tuxedo should work just fine on a non-tuxedo device. The custom optimizations should stay disabled
Also, as others have talked about it, it’s not bleeding edge KDE but stable KDE, but it’s a recent version so the desktop environment feels modern
Oh cool! I had completely forgotten about the Tuxedo devices. No worries on the slow reply, I've got three month old comments in my inbox that I swear I'll get around to crafting a respectable reply to any day now, I swear 😅
kde neon is their testbed I believe, but there are other distros shipping it too.
opensuse leap and thumbleweed defaults to installing kde plasma. leap is the slower moving version, thumbleweed is the bleeding edge rolling release distro, if you want to try it.
fedora has a kde edition, that too seems to be stable, maybe its more polished too
I feel like I’m missing out on the mint hype train tbh. I’ve never tried it before but there’s an ignorant part of me that’s like “how much better could it possibly be than Ubuntu with Cinnamon?”. I know it must be because so many people default to it and rave about it, even after using Ubuntu.
My default ol reliable used to be Solus Linux. God I loved that distro. I had an install that lasted 4 years straight, no issues whatsoever.
But in recent years I’ve taken a major liking to Bazzite. Oh my god it’s incredible: immutable OSs are fucking amazing. I shouldn’t be trusted with accessing system files, it never ends well. So this really helps.
Mint is my go-to for when I want something to get work done and don't want to fuck with it. Biggest gripe is the networking menu in Cinnamon kind of sucks for VLANs and it's still on X11 until they finish making Wayland stable.
Another vote for immutable here. I'm running Bluefin for almost a year and I absolutely love it.
My buddy asked me about options for his computer since it can't run win11, I gave him several, one of which was Linux. Gave him pros and cons. He took the bait. Been a week now on bluefin, so far so good.
I came back to linux with bluefin from windows. The concept is cool but I often found various issues with fx dragging/dropping files between apps or other interactions between apps due to the containerized approach. Had to switch because of this - mileage varies based on what apps you use. -> Opensuse but had issues with laggy YouTube the first time I opened a video, didn't want to deal with it (amd setup btw) -> cachyOS, freaking love it. Everything works, it's fast and the rolling arch style haven't broken yet
I'm a relative basic bitch, I don't want to spend forever in terminal. Mint has been a god send and I'm so happy I left windows for it. A special shout out to steam for being the goat and making what little gaming I do easy.
Yep, this is me. I'm currently using an old Nobara kernel... Because the latest kernel install (w/dependencies) completely fucked up everything and I honestly cba wasting any more time troubleshooting (tldr Wayland is NOT ready for production).
Just waiting till the motivation hits so I can do a complete rebuild. Mint is at the top of my list—it just works.
Edit: should add, one good thing Nobara does is that it keeps previous kernels installed, so that if they fuck things up (and they do), you can just select a previous kernel when booting.
With Old grafics you either use newest kernel possible and its integrated nouveau driver that is included in the kernel itself, or you use the proprietary driver with an ancient kernel version where still a version of that driver exists.
There are some projects that try to patch proprietary drivers for newer kernel, but never worked for me really..
Found sticking with rolling (arch) and nouveau the best experience on that old grafics machine
I use Debian as my daily driver for at least a decade, but I still recommend Mint because it has all the good things about Debian with extra.
Debian developers just push out kernel updates without warning you about any possible system incompatibilities, so for example if you have an Nvidia GPU you might get a notificaton to "update" and a normie will likely press it only for the PC to boot to a black screen because Debian pushed out a kernel update that breaks compatibility with Nvidia drivers and does nothing to warn the user about it, and then a normie probably won't know how to get out of the black screen to the TTY and roll back the update.
I remember this happening before and I had to go to the reddit for /r/Debian and respond to all the people freaking out explaining to them how to fix their system and rollback the update.
Operating systems like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, etc, will do more testing with their kernel before rolling it out to users. They also tend to have more up-to-date kernels. I had Debian on everything but my gaming PC that I had built recently because Debian 12 used such an old kernel that it wouldn't support my motherboard hardware. This was a kernel-level issue and couldn't be fixed just by installing a new driver. Normies are not going to want to compile their own kernel for their daily driver, and neither do I who has a lot of experience with Linux.
I ended up just using Mint until Debian 13 released on that PC because my only option would be to switch to the unstable or testing branch, or compile my own kernel, which neither I cared to do on a PC I just wanted to work and play Horizon or whatever on.
I was on Arch for 14 years, but I've started moving to Tumbleweed. I don't have the time to configure everything now, but this gives me near enough to bleeding edge.
I mean, depends on your style. I've been running endeavouros (Arch spin) on my desktop for two years now and it's finally felt like home. Though I did my first mint install in maybe 5 years just last week on my media player box in the living room (Cinnamon version) and I've gotta say, it really does feel like "ubuntu, absent all the bloat". Runs really great on a 15-year old dell optiplex with almost zero bullshit beyond having to install vlc-plugin-base.
First, that sounded so "I use arch btw", love that.
Second, I managed to get mint running on a 04-05 model dell. I was so shocked I was able to get it to boot. It didn't run too well, but it was amazing!
I've been recommended it as a windows replacement on my new MSI gaming laptop. I'm thinking about that or Zorin.
I run Lubuntunon some old laptops I have for the kids, but I'm interested in seeing how well Zoron handles hardware.
Really, I need to slap some boot usbs in it and try it out...
I've settled on fedora atomic and distros based on it, but still not set on my servers. Currently trying atomic server also but I'm not sure if I'm staying with it. I also have some talos nodes but I haven't gotten around to playing with that yet.
It's so fucking perfect. Hadn't felt so wowed by a slick put-together complete operating system since I first started using Mac OS X as a teen in like 1999. It's literally more usable than every commercial OS on the market.
For me it's been Arch for the last several years. It's the only distro that can deal with the weird things I do while still working well for daily use.
I moved to Cachy (Arch-based OS) in 2024, and it's been perfect for me. I've used Linux since around 2012, and tried to move to it as a daily driver several times over the 2010s, but I wasn't able to stick with it due to drivers/software compatibility. Cachy is the first time it really clicked, and offered everything I wanted without needing to dual-boot.
People always talk about how complicated Arch is, but learning it was almost completely frictionless. It stays out of the way when I want it to, and I can go down a tinkering rabbit hole whenever I want. I can update stuff three times a day, or forget about updates for several weeks and just run the command whenever it springs to mind. I found it way easier to pick up than Ubuntu too due to the Arch wiki.
I like to edit configs, which can break apt, and build projects from source, which requires bleeding-edge versions of many libraries that most distros don't ship with, which also tends to break apt when I manually install them.
Arch's pacman gracefully handled modified configs and the Arch repos ship very new packages, so I don't find myself fighting the OS.
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 or aurora if you don't like gaming 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.
Agree Mint is not the best option, in a big part because of their refusal to embrace QT and KDE, but I don't think every newbie needs immutability.
We often assume Linux newbies to be a bit of a grandma-style user - just browse, work with docs and play games from time to time.
But people coming to Linux are no average demographic - they are often enthusiastic about their computers and advanced use cases, and that's when they will get stuck with immutables because things work different there. Some things are different, some are harder, and some are pretty much impossible to do. Tinkering is complicated compared to traditional distros. Besides, it will always feel limiting, even if it directs you towards the best practices.
I like the way things are organized in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - it's a regular mutable rolling release distribution, yet, thanks to snapper being beautifully configured out of the box, you can be sure you can revert nearly everything. Big changes, like initiating an update, automatically trigger snapshots of all system and program files, and they are available from GRUB, so you can always revert with ease. To me, it's a very healthy compromise between ability to tinker and safety of the system.
Unfortunately, however, Tumbleweed does little to appeal to newbie users. Sure, it has some graphical tools (take YaST), but they are severely outdated and don't explain much to the user, some updates require nuances Discover cannot work with, prompting the user to go with command-line tools, etc. I would love for something to emerge that would be similar in philosophy to Tumbleweed, but more newbie-friendly.
Also, love Flatpaks and install them whenever I can. Saves so much trouble.
Last time I touched immutables I couldn't run software for censorship-resistant VPNs. Regular services are all blocked in my area (even more sophisticated ones like Mullvad and onion-routed Proton tunnels), so it takes a more involved software that doesn't work on immutables. That was a dealbreaker for me personally.
Besides, some things work better as native packages, not Flatpaks or Distroboxes. Wine is a simple example - sure, you can use Flatpaks like Bottles or Lutris or PortProton, but if you just want Wine without bells and whistles, native packet works much better than Flatpak.
Interesringly, ostree didn't solve the VPN issue for me, and for others too. Works fine on all mutable distros I tried, though (including regular Fedora editions).
Can't remember how it went with Wine. Besides, as far as I remember, installing native packets via ostree drastically increases update size and adds extra entries to manage, putting a limit on how much stuff you can reasonably install this way.
With that, I figured I'd rather take mutable system and apply good practices to it whenever possible. Snapshots? Check. Flatpaks? Always preferred. Sane management for native app repos? Yes. And with that, I never had my system fail me.
My use case can be a bit rare and specific, but there are plenty of different "rare issues" out there, and there's nothing more frustrating than figuring out your distro doesn't work with thing X and nothing can be done about it.
Immutable distros are cool, and hopefully it will all get resolved in a sane way. But to me, we're not there yet.
I started on SuSe, and stayed with it for about 4 years. YaST is indeed a strong selling point for new users, easing management and configuration of their system. But aren't they getting rid of YaST now?
Yes, they want to phase it out, though currently it's still there. My general point is, it's just not designed for Linux newcomers and that's a big shame.
Well, maybe it was considered user friendly decades ago, but with the way interfaces evolved, it didn't progress all too much. Peoples' expectations did change, though.
I'll uh, I'll take you up on that matrix add. My system is solid right now, but it'd be nice to have that option in my back pocket should I get stuck on something 😬
Edit: additionally, I agree wholeheartedly that immutable is the way forward for newbies in Linux, and honestly maybe even a power users workstation that needs maximum uptime/reliability.
I've been fiddling with Linux for over 20 years myself, but never INTENSELY, if that makes sense. I'd tinker with it on an old PC, dual boot my main PC, break it, go back to Windows for a year or two, tinker again, go fully Linux for a year, break it, back to Windows, etc etc.
I've been running Bluefin for almost a year, and I guarantee you it's gonna stick this time. It's so good, covers almost all my needs, and now I can't break it!
My experience with KDE is that it is a frustrating new user experience. I also doubt that the devs have tried setting up their desktop from defaults recently.
Kwallet (one of the two reasons I stopped using KDE):
Kwallets defaults are bad. They encourage you down an opaque path that requires CLI intervention. If you stubbornly take that path the performance of kwallet is painfully bad. Any electron app (discord, etc.) will now hang unresponsive on the main UI thread for 1 to 3 minutes if kwallet was not already open. None of these apps need kwallet. Chromium stalls in the same way on startup except that if you don't want to open the wallet it will keep asking 3-4 times taking minutes to reach the prompt each time and won't unblock the main UI thread until you either enter the password or it crashes with an error that too many wallet requests were issued. Protonvpn won't open on KDE unless a wallet is configured and unlocked. The password prompt has a time out for no cryptographically good reason which means if you try to open the wallet and then wind up distracted by something else you may time out and need to restart the waiting game from square one. Bugs have been open against kwallet for years. Allegedly they have been fixed and I have updated but the speed is still awful on my computer.
Fractional scaling:
Nominally KDE does this the "right" way but practically application support seems somewhat absent. The flagship Linux office product, Libre Office, displays microscopically on one monitor with fractional scaling on. It just works on other DEs
Borderless fullscreen with mouse capture on multiple monitors is broken and results in the mouse wandering off and going MIA in FPS style games. KDE killed me in Helldivers several times before I switched windowing modes. Honestly minor except that it seems to be the default in gaming distros where this matters
Other DE issues:
Cinnamon freezes on haswell age Intel iGPs
XFCE handles cheap Chinese graphics tablets badly
XFCE fractional scaling is confusing and requires updating too many settings. The flip side of this is it can run fractional scaling much more performantly than other DEs under x11 on lousy iGPs. The problem here is not that the scaling controls are inverted but that the graphics scale settings are scattered all over the place.
All in all I would say that Cinnamon is a lot less frustrating at an entry level than KDE on recent hardware.
Do you have the issue tracker for kwallets issues? This is my first time hearing of these. Out of all the people I have given this to not one has had any complaints with kwallet, it's possible these issues were resolved, although none of my users were using vpn's.
libreoffice uses xwayland, so that's really on them to fix and there are simple workarounds.
both of which are pretty quick fixes, kwallet can be replaced and the libreoffice issue is a toggle in the settings. I usually set people up and make sure they can do everything they need to, these issues seem very minor compared to the issues with cinnamon
New KDE's frustrating to this old user too. KDE3 (Trinity) was (is) much simpler to configure, far fewer extra fiddly clicks required, far less bloaty clunky superfluous interface getting in your way to do simple things.
I'm really enjoying Bazzite for gaming and uCore for servers. It's reassuring knowing that I can just rebase and revert to a known good state with working drivers easily. Highly recommend a try
Bazzite is nice, I'm running it at the moment. The gaming customizations are nice and having the latest kernel stable+NVIDIA open drivers is swell. You can even use Distroshelf (to emulate a distro) and App pass through to install apps that don't have a Flatpak version. Or package layering, which is needed for VPNs like Mullvad to work properly; that's also pretty easy to manage, so I never feel like I don't have access to software. Too bad stock Fedora cannot be arsed to make NVIDIA drivers brain dead easy at the time of installation.
I admire how Linux Mint makes it easy to set things up for the user's liking. Also, it gives so much confidence to the end user in learning the new platform.
imo the rumor that mint is the easiest is harmful to the whole ecosystem. it implies there arent countless other easy distros and stifles accurate choices for many new people.
@ekZepp For me, it's Debian. It always just works.
Unless you need nvidia drivers from this century
That's okay. Thanks to their insane pricing caused by covid, followed by more insane pricing caused by the AI bubble, many people are still running cards not getting any new drivers anyway.
1080ti still works great
Don't forget NFTs!
Regular crypto pump scams before that too.
Fuck nvidia
Amen
I daily drive LMDE with a 4070ti super, works perfect. I do use the proprietary drivers but I hardly ever have issues.
i might try various other distros for my desktop usage. But for my home server it will always be Debian. Rock solid.
Same. EndeavourOs on the desktop but the rest of the Homeland is Debian.
I changed one of my PCs over to Debian this month, and I was surprised at how smooth it is. I guess I was expecting it to be way more barebones. I don't know if I need more than this!
For me it’s Mint Debian Edition.
Why that and not standard Ubuntu-based Mint? At minimum you lose PPAs and the Driver Manager. What’s the upside?
I dislike ubuntu. I don't care about ppa since i'll just compile anything not in the repos. Same with drivers but i haven't needed any weird driver in years.
Thanks!
@teft Yeah, I've been tempted to take a look at Mint DE. If I ever try another distro on something I will def check that out.
It’s great, well worth a try. Stable, functional and compatible, just how I like it.
I've been running sid on my personal laptops for more than a decade. Can't imagine doing anything else
If you are happy with Debian, I'd say stay with it. I have tried many distros but I like Debian and return to it for most of my devices. Sometimes Debian will have older versions of software if you use stable, I don't really mind personally
Thats what LMDE is for, Linux Mint Debian Edition. Been my daily driver for years. Otherwise I use vanilla Debian for all my server and headless stuff.
Same. It's like coming home.
Switched my gaming PC over to Arch a little while back but the server's always going to be Debian.
I use arch btw
Arch is on my gaming pc and is alot of fun, but I must admit my old reliable is straight Debian, after hopping through a couple of Debian based distros, I tried straight deb and agree it just works. So it's installed on anything I don't wanna tinker with
@ForgottenUsername I "use arch btw"
😅
Fedora
From the bottom of my heart fuck rolling releases. Never worked for me (nobody get worked up please, ymmv).
lol it’s funny how proactively defensive everyone is about their distro choices
I use a Mac for my server 🤓
you're also not gonna like it when i roll up THESE SLEEVES TO THROW HANDS!
I've been living with fedora (ultramarine) kde for a while now because people praised fedora so much, but i think mint still wins. and i chose ultramarine because am a noob, don't sue me.
there are many little things that just don't work and i seriously can't figure out. here's a few: discover fails to update the system and i always have to do it manually from the terminal. wine is broken, it literally can't run anything i throw at it that worked on mint. plasma theme customization is somewhat broken (also custom themes prevent updating...). using alt key in games run with wine causes some annoying notification sound (not in system keyboard shortcuts). often keyboard leds stay on when system suspended, system can't be woken up from keyboard. can't use flameshot with kb shortcut.
this isn't a hate comment though, a lot of things are better than i had with mint cinnamon. i do like how it's a lot faster than mint when under heavy load, autosuspend actually works, no issues with screen not waking up. currently my media pc with mint can't update because all sources are unavailable and it has some conflict with python3 which it won't let me uninstall (which i suspect would be unwise, idk)
I can only recommend regular Fedora because I have a feeling you just wouldn’t have those issues but I am not a doctor.
Kinoite Ride or die
FOR ME it does the things I need it to do; and it works; and hasn’t blown up my house yet so 🤞
Man... I just fucking love CachyOS. I switched from Win11 a few weeks ago and up until now it is just a great experience.
I tried twice to install it- a ryzen 360 was stopped dead by this bug: https://old.reddit.com/r/cachyos/comments/1pag639/rdseed32_error_and_sddm_fails_to_start/
Figured that out and ran into the touchpad not working after sleep.
A 9300H+1650 never made it past this: https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/the-installation-of-cachyos-always-aborts-due-to-chwd-error/16754/3
0/2, cannot recommend
Ditto had it on two computers, works great
I found CachyOS while trying to figure out the best OS for my handheld. Was on bazzite before that. I ended up loving it so much I installed it on my laptop and desktop too.
Mint has been glazed since the beginning of time. Not a single laptop or computer I have ever owned has worked out of the box with it. As opposed to alternatives like Ubuntu or Fedora. I must be the single most unlucky person in the history of Linux.
I’ve had the opposite experience. Mint has just worked on literally every piece of hardware I’ve ever owned.
Is it always a new laptop/computer?
I'd be suspicious of Mint on anything brand new (and hence only recently fixed in a lot of packages).
Is there any company out there that sells PCs with Linux pre-installed? I make a ton of money selling custom built PCs that have Linux pre-installed and tested.
Several. System76 (the cosmic dev) is a major one, literally making the distro just for their laptops.
They’re mostly white boxes though. I don’t any and manufacture their own hardware (except Framework possibly???)
You can find Linux models from dell lenovo and I think even hp but you gotta search for them
There are also some specialty companies that make Linux desktops and laptops but you also gotta really seek them out
And to clarify, it's pretty much only Ubuntu that is the Linux option with the standard SI's. And I'm pretty sure it's standard Ubuntu with gnome, not Kubuntu or being able to select a different DE, etc.
So it's an option...but not something I'd seek out from Dell or HP specifically.
True but you can still save the money on the MS license and then just install whatever you want
Oh for sure. Kind of forgot about that.
I usually build my own PCs, or I buy certified refurbished systems from eBay, so I usually don't pay the Windows tax(or its baked in).
But definitely a good option to get something for cheaper, I do wish more systems had a Linux or no OS option.
And even if I plan to use Windows on a system, I usually re-install Windows anyway. Can't be too careful with what has already been installed on something.
Official lenovo eBay store 💘
I dual boot anyway so it doesn’t really matter and as shitty as MS is i find having it to be valuable nonetheless but i suppose it’s trivial to just run activation scripts
I've had the exact same experience.
Same. Works everytime without special modifications, configurations, etc.
I used it on an HP elite X2 and everything worked, touchscreen and it's specific screen cover/keyboard
It's weird tho because I didn't expect that at all.
Most distros works out of the box with that weirdly enough, only one I've had issues with was debian and the pen, but that worked itself out straight away after updating it
Sorta same, but my problems expand beyond just Mint... I had a lot of problems with Ubuntu several years back, so I was convinced to switch to Manjaro. That was an absolutely unabashed fucking nightmare. I thought I was either cursed or just too stupid for Linux for a while. I still don't know if I just got very unlucky or if I was/am too stupid for the distros that everyone shouts praises from the rooftops for... I stumbled into Garuda Linux and it has been a dream come true.
In the past 5 years I've only ever had minor issues*, like a power button light not being on. But as a developer, I'm aware my hardware choices are more likely to be popular with other developers who would have already noticed and fixed issues.
* excluding on niche distros, like Puppy ones.
As someone who runs a small volunteer run IT support group that tries to suggest Linux I've found that I often need the Ubuntu PPA to get Qualcomm WiFi cards to work.
There is no one reliable distro. Mint, itself is based off Ubuntu and also releases LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
If reliablility is measured in terms of how stable a distro is, then likely Debian with it's conservative approach to packaging updates comes to mind (No wonder large number of distros are based off Debian only).
I would even argue as long as someone isn't messing with a niche distro such as KDE Neon( meant to showcase KDE packages) or Linuxfx (or whatever it has renamed itself to, one of the few shady ones IMO ) or Trisquel OS (a GNU certified distro where running into dependency hell isn't new); it will suit user's case.
Debian, Slackware, Void, Zorin, even rolling release like Arch (basically any one that meets the user's use case is reliable)
KDE Neon is dead because its developers found out that putting an add-on repository on top of Ubuntu is not reliable at all. That's why KDE Linux is now in development.
Is there a writeup about their problems with Ubuntu? Adding repositories to Debian and/or Ubuntu is how plenty of software is distributed, so I'm surprised to hear they're unhappy with it.
I used Neon for a while, discovered that KDE were letting it go, and switched to Kubuntu. I love Kubuntu.
Kubuntu comes with mandatory Ubuntu enshittification, though. All official Ubuntu flavors do.
I mean, yeah, sure. But I like it.
Try out fedora if you ever get tired of snaps and other bs.
Otherwise, if it works, good for you
Other than snaps, what else are they doing wrong?
Insecure software in the Universe repository.
That link comes up with an error. Do you know which software it is that is/was in the universe repo?
Probably because you use a client that tries to open the link locally. OP deleted the post and that's why Lemmy cannot open its comments any longer, hence the Mastodon link that works fine in a web browser.
Pretty much everything except the base OS and Gnome.
Arch is pretty reliable
It's super reliable
It is the only reliable
Went back to Mint a few times but ultimately I like Plasma over Cinnamon, so Debian it is!
You do know that you don't have to change distros to change DE right?
Yep. I was using Plasma on Mint for a while but the consensus was you’re best off using a DE officially supported by the distro.
Never encountered any issues personally up to that point, but seemed to be the majority opinion when I researched it.
But my most recent switch was from Endeavour, so made much more sense to install Debian 13 than to Install Mint and then immediately switch DE.
Willingly switching from Arch to Debian says a lot about a person
Well, context is everything. Obviously there’s no single best distro for all use cases.
This is a 13 year old MacBook Pro, with ancient Linux-hating hybrid Nvidia/Intel graphics that needs an NVRAM modification and vga_switcheroo to do things like video acceleration properly.
And not my main computer, just for learning Linux and playing some old games.
So Endeavour worked great, but seemed like ultimately a computer that old is probably best off with stability and minimal updates rather than being bleeding-edge and subjecting it to gigabytes of updates each week.
I absolutely loved the release of LMDE, it's just what I like though, the simple intuitive interface of Mint, without dealing with Canonical's bullshit (really sour about snaps, ignore me lol).
Edit: picked back up my phone and reread what was on the screen when I realized you probably meant desktop environment and not Debian Edition when you typed DE.
I never left!
I think I'm just old enough, have fiddled with my PC enough times in the past, have enough other shit to do, and get enough coding and troubleshooting experience at work that I look at the quest to find my spirit distro and think "that's a youngster's game."
Or, you know, maybe Mint is already my spirit distro and I am experienced enough to not fix what isn't broken!
Ah that explains it, I no longer understand a single thing about computers or what people do with them anymore. You've explained it perfectly.
And here's the thing: I don't even want to know. It's not like I'm trying to understand but can't, I just don't care. I don't get it.
People with 100TB home servers, people with 3D printers and boxes filled with trash, endless upgrades for no visible change, etc
I don't have a single need or want that ends with "I need a new computer".
I completely understand the sentiment!
I am still into some tech and "new computer" type stuff. I am about to install a bigger/faster drive in my PC and set up my Home Assistant server. That PC is already my Jellyfin server. I am also in the middle of building a brand new PC for my kid, which will also run Mint, lol.
But I spend time only on the things that I've learned really matter to me, and not on all the things you're "supposed to" mess with in your home lab that you obviously have.
You know the meme (or meme category) where it's a resume or linkedin profile where the recent work history goes something like Senior Network Architect, then Goose Farmer?
I may literally have a 3D printer still in the box, and PC & networking parts all over the house, but my daily routine is embedded linux C/C++ sr developer by day and animal tender on the evenings and weekends, lol.
Neckbeard here. I run Arch btw.
The second sentence was superfluous.
Why bother with distro hopping when you can desktop hop?
I hopped from Debian to Manjaro and kept KDE Plasma. Main reason: Debian is stable, but I had to wait too long for some updates.
Some reasons
But yeah... It's a mite silly to be distro-hopping just to try different desktop environments.
Methinks several still-new users are yet to realise the desktop environment and distro are not tied together, and nearly all distros offer nearly all desktop environments to install, just one command away.
It gets even more fun when exploring all the window managers, not just the few desktop environments. And... there be ways to ease that exploration even further.
Yup, I do regular distrofuckery on my spare pc but Mint is just a rock solid option for me, great distro, feels good.
Just switched from Mint to CachyOS due to some upgraded hardware and it's been pretty nice so far. Mint will stay on all my other devices though.
Mint forever, Ubuntu without the snaps, and It generally is fuss free.
Shout-out to antiX though, revived many a "useless" old laptop with that.
Limewire?
Linux Mint
/j
Here is my distrohopping journey: Mint -> Arco -> Debian -> KDE Neon -> Artix -> Void -> NixOS -> Fedora -> Void
I'm surprised you didn't stick with NixOS. After spending tens of hours learning how to use it, the sunk cost fallacy is strong.
I had already converted my home manager configuration into normal config files and was using Home Manager just to manage symlinks.
I was using Nix for system configuration but that doesn't mean that I forgot how to set up a Linux system by more conventional methods (it's like learning how to ride a bike). While I do like the declarative aspect, doing everything in one language didn't appeal anymore after over a year of using NixOS...
Also, I wanted a package manager that told me what packages would be updated, and which let me search packages from the command line easily... Nix didn't provide that and it was annoying me.
I do miss flake.nix or shell.nix files and Nix shells though. But XBPS (Void's package manager) has its fair share of cool things as well and seems easier to understand, which is a bonus.
Just delete the configuration.nix file along with all backups of it and its easy to not look back. At least that did it for me since my system needed specific boot settings to even work and relearning all that wasn't worth it.
An OS should GTFO and let you get on with the business of doing shit on your computer, Linux Mint does that nicely. 🐧
except it doesn't. Fixed release model quite easily gets in a way of doing shit. Need to add a PPA into config for each separate package you need the latest release of, or simply because the package itself is absent in the normal repo doesn't help either. And don't get me started on troubleshooting after "doing shit".
Something like fedora does a much better job if you prefer fixed release, but if you like to experiment and "do shit", arch derivatives like Endeavor or Cachy are just better suited for you. All of the above also have a much nicer documentation than Mint.
For most people, especially those who want to migrate from other OS, micromanaging package versions is not part of doing shit.
well, it apparently was an issue for me on Mint, when i just switched from windows.
I might misremember things, but i believe some Microsoft stuff was inside PPA, so for someone just switching from windows it's actually more likely to delve into the apt fuckery.
Noob distro btw
Well, I switched to Linux to get away from Microsoft bullshit so I never tried installing any of their stuff but I can see that being an issue for some people.
I also had the same experience with Mint having outdated packages. And at that time I was a Linux noob so I figured I'd just wait until Mint updated their shit.
Well days turned into weeks and then about 3 months later, still with no updates from Mint, I jumped ship to Fedora. Which Fedora was nice but then I hopped to Kubuntu and now I'm on CachyOS.
I see all of this Mint hype and while I do love Cinnamon; I would never put Mint on my own devices going forward. It's definitely a distro I would put on my mom's laptop or a grandparent's device. But their release schedule is abhorrent.
+1 for Fedora being the best distro for getitng out of your way so you can get on with doing stuff.
I mean, literally Linus himself runs Fedora for this very reason.
Only because it's easier and faster to install new kernels with. Otherwise, I suspect he doesn't much care about gaming or other more "normal uses."
lol, didn't know that
Didn't he recently switch to something else? I forget what. Maybe I'm misremembering.
Didn't hear about it, at least recently when Linus Torvals came to Linus Sebastian (aka Linus Tech Tips), they were still discussing Fedora
I probably misremembered.
I thought it was in that that he mentioned he'd recently changed to something else.
Maybe crossed wires in my memory. Ugh, I don't wanna go rewatch that... fun as it was.
In the context of the comment, "do shit" is explicitly not anything to do with the OS or packages or repos.
Tumbleweed
I prefer Kali because dragons are freakin awesome.
Have you tried Garuda Linux yet? Another dragon themed distro with tons of dragon themes.
For when you want the Ubuntu of Ubuntu as opposed to the Ubuntu of Debian.
Apparently, it’s dangerous to mention Arch— but I’d dare to do just that!
Unironically my most headache-free Linux experience in 10+ years. The handful of times an update doesn't go through you just need to visit the homepage and follow the manual intervention steps outlined in the announcement.
At least, once I freed myself from Nvidia x)
I know CachyOS, at least, shows recent Arch announcements during the update process before installing anything. Unfortunately there's been a recurring DDoS attack on Arch's servers for months, so this check tends to fail and you aren't always notified of breaking changes.
I cannot count the number of times Debian Upgrade broke on me. My memory tells me I had issues with all upgrades (on various machines with mostly defaults) since Debian 8. It’s 13 now. I did follow the correct upgrade process and quite familiar with it, yet every single time I had issues at least for some of the desktops of my elder relatives and friends that I managed. Arch was just stable. And manual intervention is usually needed only if you have this particular thing installed. So, quite seldom. For servers, I think that was much better for me, but now I’m either Arch or Fedora (for situations where I don’t bother with setting my personal environment).
Back then it was for many simply the first rolling distro they tried... to suddenly realize that without tedious (and rarely unproblematic) release upgrades the reasons for a new install (thus trying out yet another distro) also vanished.
I have reinstalled Arch on the same machine only once, after SSD of my super old MacBook Air got corrupted. I haven’t used the laptop for like five years. Weirdly, a reinstall went well, and it looks like the SSD works well so far. Apart from that, my oldest system is about 7 years old, and it’s running well. I have no reason to reinstall. That very machine is a server. Also, I had a MacBook Pro broke keyboard on me, I simply rsynced my entire system to another MacBook Pro, and was done within about two hours. Needed to update
/etc/fstaband maybe something else too. So, apart from Arch becoming a bit of a meme, I cannot recommend it more. It taught me quite a lot too. It was mostly stable for me.Desktop? Debian with GNOME. Laptop? Debian with GNOME. Tablet? Debian with GNOME. Server? Believe it or not, Debian without GNOME.
Okay, I'll bite:
Why GNOME? I personally find it very limiting, especially when attempting a Vanilla GNOME config.
A lot of people seem to feel like this. It's obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.
And it's always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.
I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don't tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.
Out of curiosity, what music software are you using on Linux? I haven't found a DAW I've liked.
We are just getting into this. One kid has been heavily using lmms the last couple of months. It is very limited but perfect for him composiing game music.
Other family just do basic editing with ardour. We want to level up a bit. Just bought a reaper licence and have been playing with it and a midi controller and some plugins.
Bitwig also looks very nice and seems easy to use.
We are newbs with this stuff. Normally I like to only use free and open source only but both reaper and bitwig feel like pretty good value.
I guess average people are not opinionated about desktop environments. they got familiar with one, and it's fine to them, they're not even thinking about trying something else.
Yes, I understand that GNOME (3+) has a place in Linux/*nix world and that, from a common user's perspective, it might be enough or even more intuitive than Windows and MacOS ever were. Blind hating never helped anyone, especially in FOSS.
For me, as someone outside the common user's realm, the weird aftertaste of internal dev drama and their decisions which features are "needed" and which are not needed (server-side decorations, tray-items, etc.) deter me from using GNOME more than the annual one-month tryout ("Maybe it isn't that limiting to me as I thought?").
:s/GNOME/KDE/gOne small change and we could be twins. My Debian server also runs Proxmox though, that's where I distrohop. In VMs.
Debian is my favorite as well. I prefer KDE, though, because it is pretty. I also don't get the GNOME hate, I just don't love it as much and at this point KDE is way more familiar.
Which tablet do you have?
A Latitude 7210 I got for cheap.
I will never understand people who willingly subject themselves to Debian when there are so many better alternatives
Fedora for me tbh
Mint is decent too though
Fedora for life.
What desktop env
Gnome
Yea installed on my new laptop, actually nice
After testing LM with Cinnamon, and a ubuntu based distribution with KDE… KDE is just better.
What are some things you preferred in KDE over Cinnamon? I haven't explored KDE much.
The interface looks more recent. Also I can use Wayland, as X11 can be a pain with scaling or specific setups
Apart from that, there are good default apps (although you can download KDE's stuff anyways), KDE is pretty transparent as an organization. Things like notifications are more sexy than cinnamon. Built in options like Win+P showing screen display works just like windows
Good animations, a good range of default widgets and taskbar config for my needs (it’s pretty limited imo but it’s enough for me)
Terminal is great but I got some problems like .sh scripts not showing a window but just running in background when double clicked. Apart from that, Kate (default editor), Konsole (terminal) are well built
They also have built in support for Nextcloud sync icons in the file browser, which is nice
I prefer the update manager of Mint but no big deal (can’t update only one package in KDE's GUI)
Things like managing battery and connecting to Bluetooth devices is beautiful. Everything feels premium, fast, sleek.
this. im so sick of everyone just telling new people to get mint. cinnamon isnt the best choice for every new person. i hate that its just told to every new person, point blank.
Is it KDE Neon? I've been curious if it's any good, haven't tried. It's just Ubuntu LTS with Plasma.
Neon is great, but don't use it for mission critical stuff. I've had updates brick my system before because it's bleeding edge for KDE.
It isn’t! I used TuxedoOS.
The main reason was that I have a tuxedo laptop, but they also adopted the same moves as mint: mirrored Ubuntu’s repos for privacy, and disabled snap by default. Also, moved ping/internet connectivity check to their own server.
I do believe the packages are a bit outdated but same problem on Mint
I think KDE Neon is more up to date with the packages but still use the default servers, so Canonical gets some of your pings
Btw tuxedo should work just fine on a non-tuxedo device. The custom optimizations should stay disabled
Also, as others have talked about it, it’s not bleeding edge KDE but stable KDE, but it’s a recent version so the desktop environment feels modern
Sorry for the slow response, I was busy
Oh cool! I had completely forgotten about the Tuxedo devices. No worries on the slow reply, I've got three month old comments in my inbox that I swear I'll get around to crafting a respectable reply to any day now, I swear 😅
kde neon is their testbed I believe, but there are other distros shipping it too.
opensuse leap and thumbleweed defaults to installing kde plasma. leap is the slower moving version, thumbleweed is the bleeding edge rolling release distro, if you want to try it.
fedora has a kde edition, that too seems to be stable, maybe its more polished too
I feel like I’m missing out on the mint hype train tbh. I’ve never tried it before but there’s an ignorant part of me that’s like “how much better could it possibly be than Ubuntu with Cinnamon?”. I know it must be because so many people default to it and rave about it, even after using Ubuntu.
My default ol reliable used to be Solus Linux. God I loved that distro. I had an install that lasted 4 years straight, no issues whatsoever.
But in recent years I’ve taken a major liking to Bazzite. Oh my god it’s incredible: immutable OSs are fucking amazing. I shouldn’t be trusted with accessing system files, it never ends well. So this really helps.
Mint is my go-to for when I want something to get work done and don't want to fuck with it. Biggest gripe is the networking menu in Cinnamon kind of sucks for VLANs and it's still on X11 until they finish making Wayland stable.
Another vote for immutable here. I'm running Bluefin for almost a year and I absolutely love it.
My buddy asked me about options for his computer since it can't run win11, I gave him several, one of which was Linux. Gave him pros and cons. He took the bait. Been a week now on bluefin, so far so good.
I came back to linux with bluefin from windows. The concept is cool but I often found various issues with fx dragging/dropping files between apps or other interactions between apps due to the containerized approach. Had to switch because of this - mileage varies based on what apps you use. -> Opensuse but had issues with laggy YouTube the first time I opened a video, didn't want to deal with it (amd setup btw) -> cachyOS, freaking love it. Everything works, it's fast and the rolling arch style haven't broken yet
Now that you mention it, I have come across an issue or two like that 🤔🤷♂️
I had a peak at cachy after hearing so much about it, but never tried it long term.
Went with LMDE7 for my first full daily driver install, real happy so far :)
I tried CachyOS and so far it's been alright besides having bit difficulty finding software so I have stuff from multiple sources.
Hmm? The AUR is one of the biggest pros of Arch and derivatives imo
If the software you need is available as .deb or .rpm, you can use Distrobox. For everything else, AppImages and Flatpaks
Aur can be a bit... Wonky in my experience, sometimes stuff just fails to install or work after.
I don't mean to sound dismissive but I don't think I've ever had that happen, except if I forgot to
pacman -Syubefore.Or have you been naughty and used
pip install --break-system-packages? :DI'm a relative basic bitch, I don't want to spend forever in terminal. Mint has been a god send and I'm so happy I left windows for it. A special shout out to steam for being the goat and making what little gaming I do easy.
Gentoo, I'm home
Yep, this is me. I'm currently using an old Nobara kernel... Because the latest kernel install (w/dependencies) completely fucked up everything and I honestly cba wasting any more time troubleshooting (tldr Wayland is NOT ready for production).
Just waiting till the motivation hits so I can do a complete rebuild. Mint is at the top of my list—it just works.
Edit: should add, one good thing Nobara does is that it keeps previous kernels installed, so that if they fuck things up (and they do), you can just select a previous kernel when booting.
Void Linux made me stop distrohopping
Finding a distro that worked with my ancient Nvidia was a challenge.
Ancient NVidia should be supported by Nouveau by now, no?
As far as I found, it doesn't always work with adding the driver afterwards because Nvidia apparently, and some distros leave out the older stuff.
With Old grafics you either use newest kernel possible and its integrated nouveau driver that is included in the kernel itself, or you use the proprietary driver with an ancient kernel version where still a version of that driver exists.
There are some projects that try to patch proprietary drivers for newer kernel, but never worked for me really..
Found sticking with rolling (arch) and nouveau the best experience on that old grafics machine
How are Nvidia leaving out older stuff for Nouveau? I don't understand.
I don't know how long I've used Debian at this point.
I use Debian as my daily driver for at least a decade, but I still recommend Mint because it has all the good things about Debian with extra.
Debian developers just push out kernel updates without warning you about any possible system incompatibilities, so for example if you have an Nvidia GPU you might get a notificaton to "update" and a normie will likely press it only for the PC to boot to a black screen because Debian pushed out a kernel update that breaks compatibility with Nvidia drivers and does nothing to warn the user about it, and then a normie probably won't know how to get out of the black screen to the TTY and roll back the update.
I remember this happening before and I had to go to the reddit for /r/Debian and respond to all the people freaking out explaining to them how to fix their system and rollback the update.
Operating systems like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, etc, will do more testing with their kernel before rolling it out to users. They also tend to have more up-to-date kernels. I had Debian on everything but my gaming PC that I had built recently because Debian 12 used such an old kernel that it wouldn't support my motherboard hardware. This was a kernel-level issue and couldn't be fixed just by installing a new driver. Normies are not going to want to compile their own kernel for their daily driver, and neither do I who has a lot of experience with Linux.
I ended up just using Mint until Debian 13 released on that PC because my only option would be to switch to the unstable or testing branch, or compile my own kernel, which neither I cared to do on a PC I just wanted to work and play Horizon or whatever on.
Can always sid (or ceres)
I started with Debian and XFCE and I still use Debian and XFCE lol
The only people who use Debian are the people who started with Debian
Probably true, I have no desire to change my habits of 20 years now lol
Anything but Canonical Shit
I went Debian -> Ubuntu -> Lubuntu -> Mint -> [some obscure abandoned hobby distro] -> Arch. I've been on Arch for three years now.
I was on Arch for 14 years, but I've started moving to Tumbleweed. I don't have the time to configure everything now, but this gives me near enough to bleeding edge.
But I like HDR support…
This is literally my only problem with mint. I just boot into kubuntu whenever I want to watch something in HDR.
I mean, depends on your style. I've been running endeavouros (Arch spin) on my desktop for two years now and it's finally felt like home. Though I did my first mint install in maybe 5 years just last week on my media player box in the living room (Cinnamon version) and I've gotta say, it really does feel like "ubuntu, absent all the bloat". Runs really great on a 15-year old dell optiplex with almost zero bullshit beyond having to install vlc-plugin-base.
First, that sounded so "I use arch btw", love that.
Second, I managed to get mint running on a 04-05 model dell. I was so shocked I was able to get it to boot. It didn't run too well, but it was amazing!
I've been recommended it as a windows replacement on my new MSI gaming laptop. I'm thinking about that or Zorin.
I run Lubuntunon some old laptops I have for the kids, but I'm interested in seeing how well Zoron handles hardware.
Really, I need to slap some boot usbs in it and try it out...
I've settled on fedora atomic and distros based on it, but still not set on my servers. Currently trying atomic server also but I'm not sure if I'm staying with it. I also have some talos nodes but I haven't gotten around to playing with that yet.
EndeavourOS is all i need and will ever need.
It's so fucking perfect. Hadn't felt so wowed by a slick put-together complete operating system since I first started using Mac OS X as a teen in like 1999. It's literally more usable than every commercial OS on the market.
Cinnaminty goodness...
Its nice if you aren't on a laptop and need Wayland.
My first choice. Currently my only!
Solid first choice!
For me it's been Arch for the last several years. It's the only distro that can deal with the weird things I do while still working well for daily use.
I moved to Cachy (Arch-based OS) in 2024, and it's been perfect for me. I've used Linux since around 2012, and tried to move to it as a daily driver several times over the 2010s, but I wasn't able to stick with it due to drivers/software compatibility. Cachy is the first time it really clicked, and offered everything I wanted without needing to dual-boot.
People always talk about how complicated Arch is, but learning it was almost completely frictionless. It stays out of the way when I want it to, and I can go down a tinkering rabbit hole whenever I want. I can update stuff three times a day, or forget about updates for several weeks and just run the command whenever it springs to mind. I found it way easier to pick up than Ubuntu too due to the Arch wiki.
can you explain a few of those weird things?
I like to edit configs, which can break apt, and build projects from source, which requires bleeding-edge versions of many libraries that most distros don't ship with, which also tends to break apt when I manually install them.
Arch's pacman gracefully handled modified configs and the Arch repos ship very new packages, so I don't find myself fighting the OS.
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 or aurora if you don't like gaming 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.
Agree Mint is not the best option, in a big part because of their refusal to embrace QT and KDE, but I don't think every newbie needs immutability.
We often assume Linux newbies to be a bit of a grandma-style user - just browse, work with docs and play games from time to time.
But people coming to Linux are no average demographic - they are often enthusiastic about their computers and advanced use cases, and that's when they will get stuck with immutables because things work different there. Some things are different, some are harder, and some are pretty much impossible to do. Tinkering is complicated compared to traditional distros. Besides, it will always feel limiting, even if it directs you towards the best practices.
I like the way things are organized in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - it's a regular mutable rolling release distribution, yet, thanks to snapper being beautifully configured out of the box, you can be sure you can revert nearly everything. Big changes, like initiating an update, automatically trigger snapshots of all system and program files, and they are available from GRUB, so you can always revert with ease. To me, it's a very healthy compromise between ability to tinker and safety of the system.
Unfortunately, however, Tumbleweed does little to appeal to newbie users. Sure, it has some graphical tools (take YaST), but they are severely outdated and don't explain much to the user, some updates require nuances Discover cannot work with, prompting the user to go with command-line tools, etc. I would love for something to emerge that would be similar in philosophy to Tumbleweed, but more newbie-friendly.
Also, love Flatpaks and install them whenever I can. Saves so much trouble.
What exactly is harder or impossible to do with immutables? As far as I am aware it is basically all upsides and no downsides honestly.
Last time I touched immutables I couldn't run software for censorship-resistant VPNs. Regular services are all blocked in my area (even more sophisticated ones like Mullvad and onion-routed Proton tunnels), so it takes a more involved software that doesn't work on immutables. That was a dealbreaker for me personally.
Besides, some things work better as native packages, not Flatpaks or Distroboxes. Wine is a simple example - sure, you can use Flatpaks like Bottles or Lutris or PortProton, but if you just want Wine without bells and whistles, native packet works much better than Flatpak.
You could have used rpm-ostree for that. All of that, actually.
Interesringly, ostree didn't solve the VPN issue for me, and for others too. Works fine on all mutable distros I tried, though (including regular Fedora editions).
Can't remember how it went with Wine. Besides, as far as I remember, installing native packets via ostree drastically increases update size and adds extra entries to manage, putting a limit on how much stuff you can reasonably install this way.
With that, I figured I'd rather take mutable system and apply good practices to it whenever possible. Snapshots? Check. Flatpaks? Always preferred. Sane management for native app repos? Yes. And with that, I never had my system fail me.
My use case can be a bit rare and specific, but there are plenty of different "rare issues" out there, and there's nothing more frustrating than figuring out your distro doesn't work with thing X and nothing can be done about it.
Immutable distros are cool, and hopefully it will all get resolved in a sane way. But to me, we're not there yet.
I started on SuSe, and stayed with it for about 4 years. YaST is indeed a strong selling point for new users, easing management and configuration of their system. But aren't they getting rid of YaST now?
Yes, they want to phase it out, though currently it's still there. My general point is, it's just not designed for Linux newcomers and that's a big shame.
Huh?
I was a linux newcomer, and YaST felt very well designed for me.
Have they ruined the design in the past couple decades?
Well, maybe it was considered user friendly decades ago, but with the way interfaces evolved, it didn't progress all too much. Peoples' expectations did change, though.
I'll uh, I'll take you up on that matrix add. My system is solid right now, but it'd be nice to have that option in my back pocket should I get stuck on something 😬
Edit: additionally, I agree wholeheartedly that immutable is the way forward for newbies in Linux, and honestly maybe even a power users workstation that needs maximum uptime/reliability.
I've been fiddling with Linux for over 20 years myself, but never INTENSELY, if that makes sense. I'd tinker with it on an old PC, dual boot my main PC, break it, go back to Windows for a year or two, tinker again, go fully Linux for a year, break it, back to Windows, etc etc.
I've been running Bluefin for almost a year, and I guarantee you it's gonna stick this time. It's so good, covers almost all my needs, and now I can't break it!
Feel free to send me a message:
@communist:4d2.org
My experience with KDE is that it is a frustrating new user experience. I also doubt that the devs have tried setting up their desktop from defaults recently.
Kwallet (one of the two reasons I stopped using KDE): Kwallets defaults are bad. They encourage you down an opaque path that requires CLI intervention. If you stubbornly take that path the performance of kwallet is painfully bad. Any electron app (discord, etc.) will now hang unresponsive on the main UI thread for 1 to 3 minutes if kwallet was not already open. None of these apps need kwallet. Chromium stalls in the same way on startup except that if you don't want to open the wallet it will keep asking 3-4 times taking minutes to reach the prompt each time and won't unblock the main UI thread until you either enter the password or it crashes with an error that too many wallet requests were issued. Protonvpn won't open on KDE unless a wallet is configured and unlocked. The password prompt has a time out for no cryptographically good reason which means if you try to open the wallet and then wind up distracted by something else you may time out and need to restart the waiting game from square one. Bugs have been open against kwallet for years. Allegedly they have been fixed and I have updated but the speed is still awful on my computer.
Fractional scaling: Nominally KDE does this the "right" way but practically application support seems somewhat absent. The flagship Linux office product, Libre Office, displays microscopically on one monitor with fractional scaling on. It just works on other DEs
Borderless fullscreen with mouse capture on multiple monitors is broken and results in the mouse wandering off and going MIA in FPS style games. KDE killed me in Helldivers several times before I switched windowing modes. Honestly minor except that it seems to be the default in gaming distros where this matters
Other DE issues:
All in all I would say that Cinnamon is a lot less frustrating at an entry level than KDE on recent hardware.
Do you have the issue tracker for kwallets issues? This is my first time hearing of these. Out of all the people I have given this to not one has had any complaints with kwallet, it's possible these issues were resolved, although none of my users were using vpn's.
libreoffice uses xwayland, so that's really on them to fix and there are simple workarounds.
both of which are pretty quick fixes, kwallet can be replaced and the libreoffice issue is a toggle in the settings. I usually set people up and make sure they can do everything they need to, these issues seem very minor compared to the issues with cinnamon
New KDE's frustrating to this old user too. KDE3 (Trinity) was (is) much simpler to configure, far fewer extra fiddly clicks required, far less bloaty clunky superfluous interface getting in your way to do simple things.
The thing is you are actually thinking about it and stating facts instead of just repeating what everybody is saying.
For me, it's been Manjaro for ten years, but I'm eyeing atomic distros more and more, like Bazzite.
I'm really enjoying Bazzite for gaming and uCore for servers. It's reassuring knowing that I can just rebase and revert to a known good state with working drivers easily. Highly recommend a try
Bazzite is nice, I'm running it at the moment. The gaming customizations are nice and having the latest kernel stable+NVIDIA open drivers is swell. You can even use Distroshelf (to emulate a distro) and App pass through to install apps that don't have a Flatpak version. Or package layering, which is needed for VPNs like Mullvad to work properly; that's also pretty easy to manage, so I never feel like I don't have access to software. Too bad stock Fedora cannot be arsed to make NVIDIA drivers brain dead easy at the time of installation.
Yeah, Bazzite seems user-friendlier, like Manjaro was for Arch
Mmm, Bazzite is certainly user-friendlier, kinda like SteamOS is (the only Arch based thing I feel is user-friendlier).
Good thing I’ll never tire of distrohopping then.
Zorin for me. Looks good, never breaks.
I'm surprised I had to scroll so much to see a post about Zorin.
Bedrock stopped my rabid^1^ distrohopping in 2012. Daily driving since^2^.
::: spoiler .
^1^ Seriously. Filled multiple spools of CDs and DVDs before switching to USB. The tall spools.
^2^ One brief interlude back to just Devuan, to "keep things simple" during the most stressful time of my life. Long horrible story.
I play with distro's on task specific PC's but with my main rig I stick with my distro.
I admire how Linux Mint makes it easy to set things up for the user's liking. Also, it gives so much confidence to the end user in learning the new platform.
imo the rumor that mint is the easiest is harmful to the whole ecosystem. it implies there arent countless other easy distros and stifles accurate choices for many new people.
Yeah.
"Just use mint" became a lazy retort to new users seeking help in picking a distro, and those being asked getting tired of it.
Dozens of viable candidate distros, many of which may fit each user better per their unique needs.
my sentiments exactly
Why? It is a great distro for new beginners. Ofc is not the only one.
I'm still waiting for a useable screen reader :(
I tried Mint this weekend. Steam was broken out of the box, when it works flawlessly on Ubuntu and Manjaro on the same hardware.