What would you say is the most reliable, "it just works" distro currently?
Obviously this is somewhat subjective, but I've had a lot of problems in my previous attempts to switch to Linux, so I'd like to create a list of distros to try out, and see what works for me. I'm mostly expecting to be doing basic office work and light gaming via Steam.
Besides Debian?
Debian is also my answer.
Mint works perfectly for me, for that same use case
Of the 10~20 distros I tested in these past ~4 years, Mint is the only one I needed to go way out of my way to break anything. Also most of what you'd need is orderly laid out in the "Start menu" (don't remember if it has a specific name on Linux), including there being a GUI-based "app store", so it's also pretty straight forward to install most day-to-day stuff.
The only downside of Mint is outdated packages.
I thought you were going to say you had to go way out of your way to fix it at first 😂 I was like wait what?
Definitely mint for "just works", personally used it on loads of computers and haven't encountered any issues
Mint Debian Edition
What's different between LMDE and choosing cinnamon when installing debian? Do they change anything under the hood on the debian base?
It's the same Debian base under the hood, but has:
The difference is LMDE uses debian and its packages as a base while the "cinnamon" edition uses Ubuntu as a base. I believe they both actually use cinnamon as the DE.
It's more of a just in case because a lot of the linux community isn't like Conical lately.
Does that mean that the packages available to LMDE are older?
Potentially I honestly don't follow it enough. They might use Debian testing or some for newer packages.
Debian.
I think I'm a newcomer to linux even if I did use Ubuntu for many years. But generally I have no idea what I'm doing at any given time.
About a month ago I switched to Debian. No issues. Everything works. I should have changed years ago.
Shortlist of traditional distros, ordered roughly in descending order:
Shortlist ofOnly^[Technically, any of uBlue's distros qualifies. But Bazzite is a lot more popular than the others. Hence you'll have an easier time finding resources for it.] recommendation for atomic distros:As for deciding between a traditional or atomic distro, I'd personally suggest to try out Bazzite first. And refer to their documentation whenever something comes up during initial setup. If at any point, you're not able to get it to work even with the help of its community —^[I know using the em dash here makes me look sus AF, but I can assure the reader that no LLMs were used in the creation of this writing.] be it through their Discord, Discourse or sub
reddit— then simply pivot to the traditional distros.what is wayland and how important is it?
Basically, whenever an app has a GUI it wants to display, it communicates that to 'the system' with all the necessary details. After which 'the system' does the rendering and whatnot. Wayland is a protocol that defines a set of rules on how this interaction should take place. Hence, technically, it is only (the defining) part of the modern solution.
Very. Basically, either it or its 'predecessor'^[The term is used loosely here, because there's a very big difference between the two.] X11 is involved whenever you want to display/render anything^[Which, to be clear, happens literally all the time. Unless your display needs don't go beyond what was already available on MS-DOS*.] on desktop Linux. As X11 has been abandoned in favor of Wayland, some modern features like HDR or VRR are only found on the latter. On the other hand, I believe Wayland was never meant to offer full feature-parity with X11. Hence, some unsupported edge cases may continue to exist indefinitely. Thankfully, it has come a long way. What remains are some concerns related to accessibility AND the adjustment^[Like, how only very recently Electron got to become proper Wayland-native. Note that Xwayland is included with Wayland as a compatibility layer whenever something is not Wayland-native yet.] of the surrounding ecosystem.
Thank you for the intro, that helped. Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant
Glad to hear it was helpful.
Yup. FWIW, there's also the security argument; I.e. X11 makes keylogging trivial, while Wayland provides protection against it by default. Having said that, there is experimental support for Wayland in Linux Mint. But, ideally, it needs more time to cook.
If you have HDR monitors or high resolution screens, that need fractional scaling you’re better off with Wayland and KDE.
Not very. X11 is still widely used and works fine. Wayland is the future, but you'll probably be fine either way.
I copied this table from here: https://www.linuxteck.com/x11-vs-wayland/
Regarding its architecture, the table says about Wayland the following
While this has been true in practice, this isn't dictated. For example, very recently, we're finally seeing the decouplement of the compositor from the window manager. Granted, this is still a very recent development and we don't know if others will follow suit. But I'm excited to see where this will lead us.
Wayland is replacing X11 at a rate where quality control isn't there.
Headless: debian
Gui: mint
All the popular distros are more reliable than Windows 🤷
I really hate to be that person but that is unfortunately not always been my experience 😅
I've been using linux for like 10 years and aside from when I was doing really weird customization shit windows isnt supposed to even be able to do, I had pretty much zero issues. I've definitely experienced my fair share of jank on linux. I love it anyway, but as a less technical person I'm not entirely convinced thats always the case woth any popular distro
Well, Windows 7 and 10 were pretty good, but Windows 11...
My girlfriend bought a brand new laptop. Everything except Nvidia drivers worked out of the box. Nvidia also installed just fine. But on Windows 11 keyboard lights just refused to work and she never figured out how to solve that... Also vpns just randomly break on Windows while working perfectly fine with Fedora.
I myself have had a different experience with Linux. I've always loved tinkering around so I used to constantly break stuff. That's why I was quite shocked to find out Linux worked out so well for my non tech-savvy gf. But apparently for normal everyday use Linux has become a solid, or even a better alternative to Windows.
Depends on your hardware. I have had lots of issues with Linux regarding audio quality over Bluetooth, sound quality over laptop speakers, wifi driver reliability (had to disable power save), wake from sleep. For older NVDIA cards you can choose either the unsupported old binary drivers on an old kernel version or terrible performance and bugs with the free nouveau drivers. Wayland doesn’t work with the old binary drivers either.
Getting consistent theming between different versions of Qt and GTK working feels like an impossible task.
Mint, debian, fedora, Ubuntu, freebsd, tails have all been pretty simple experiences imo
Pretty much just stay away from cutting edge, rolling release, build from source, beta, testing branch etc and you'll be fine, look for something with LTS in the versions name
Freebsd? That one surprises me.
Mint. It’s just good out of the box.
If you tell us what hardware you’re on, we might have other suggestions… but probably still Mint.
If you want to focus primarily on gaming that can also do basic office work, check out Bazzite. If you want to do primarily basic office work that can also do gaming, check out either Bluefin or Aurora depending on whether you prefer Gnome or KDE, respectively.
All three are sister distros and are part of the immutable distros collection. Unless you actively want to tinker with your system level files, immutable distros keep everything that you need to run your computer read only. The only things you can mess up are your own files, so as long as you reboot from time to time, your computer will always be up to date and working. The result is you spend less time trying to get your computer working and more time doing whatever it is you want to be doing on it.
A lot of people will recommend Mint or Ubuntu. They're… fine, but they're not what they once were and you can do better. Don't listen to anyone who tells you to run Arch unless you are into mining your own silicon.
I will say the major stability improvement on immutables is just running apps in flatpaks. You take any of the stock systems (debian, opensuse, fedora) pick a popular desktop env like kde or gnome, and install nothing but updates to the baseos and flatpaks and you will be very stable.
I do love my bazite, bluefin, and kinote though.
I've layered a bunch of packages and have never had stability issues because of it
I mean that it just as stable as the base system plus a snapshot on update shrug
which yeah, is generally alright
I should probably change to Debian. Ubuntu has become a bit of a dumpster fire from its former glory as Debian for noobs. Also avoid Nvidia if you want it just works. (Nvidia can work... probably better than it used to but if you don't want to screw with things)
If you have an Nvidia GPU, it's hard to beat Linux Mint, unless you have the absolute newest bleeding edge hardware.
If you have an AMD or Intel GPU, Linux Mint Debian edition is great.
TempleOS
I've been very happy with CachyOS but would probably recommend Fedora.
I installed catchyos last week and it's almost creepy how everything "just works"
Been on Bazzite for a while now. Have never been happier in Linux. I'm a software engineer and occasional gamer for context
Depends, how new is your hardware? Bleeding edge hardware is probably going to do better on a bleeding edge distro. Or at least a rolling release.
Old and crusty? Anything Debian or Ubuntu based should be more than stable.
No issues with bazzite or kubuntu.
Only reasons I moved off of Mint was that it had minor issues with NVidia gaming performance, and I ended up liking KDE Plasma better than Cinnamon. Was plenty stable, otherwise.
Can't really recommend bazzite, that I moved to, since there's several issues that have proven unsolvable for me, due to the filesystem veing immutable.
Could you be explicit? I think it's more beneficial that way. Thanks in advance!
I've posted and commented about it a few times, so I can just link you those:
https://midwest.social/comment/22303985
https://midwest.social/post/42063982
Thank you!
FWIW, I don't think any of these are directly related to "immutability"; i.e. in the case of Bazzite, some subfolders of
/being read-only at runtime.I don’t use them myself but Debian or Ubuntu are probably what you’re looking for.
Fedora (GNOME)
Respectfully disagree.
Gnome is the environment not implementing Server-side window decorations.
That makes everything harder for app developers since they have to implement client side window decorations to make apps movable just for Gnome.
When apps can't be moved around on Gnome because they don't have a window handle to drag, it doesn't really fit the "it just works" requirement.
I can imagine a good NixOS config working pretty well. Just need to find someone's repo that has all you need already set up.
Nobara for gaming. I've had issues with multiple other distros but Nobara just works. It's based on Fedora but is preconfigured with everything needed to game right away. Every other distro I've had to fix some random issue from Steam not running (latest Fedora) to game controllers needing to be remapped. Nobara sorts this all for you. Fedora for a laptop. It seems to have the best support for a variety of weird hardware. Bazzite for TV gaming. That's basically what it's built for.
Fedora worked for me out of the box. The only software I had to install npmfusion (Nvidia driver) for a higher refresh rate and that was easy. But even without that, I had full resolution
I've had no issues running ZorinOS.
Yeah, zero tweaks needed. It just works out of the box. Don't even need to use the terminal.
Mint, CachyOS, PopOS, KDE Neon
I installed ZorinOS recently. For a basic user its a great distro. It is preinstalled with Brave and LibreOffice. Easy to use DE. There would be no need to touch the terminal.
I am running Adguard Home and I was able to set that up via the App Manager. Not bad.
I needed a terminal for Docker, but most everyday users won't require that.
Anything "immutable"
Any other answer is outdated and wrong.
Edit: holy shit the amount of mint recommendations is crazy. Stay away from mint, it sucks. It's just a less reliable version of Ubuntu. If all you like its desktop environment, that's called "Cinnamon", and it can be installed in other distros.
LMDE isn't Ubuntu redux. It's what i'm using because it was what i used from the get go 3 years ago and can't be ass'd changing because it works and has never crashed.
90% of what I do is use FF, Joplin, Darktable, Inkscape, Caliber and QBTorrent. A little gaming on Steam and Heroic and messaging on Singal Desktop is the other 10% of my use, so clicking an icon on a dock is about as easy as it gets.
My only minor annoyance is the PrtScr button on my Logitech KB doesn't work (have sollar Installed) but I just use Flameshot anyway.