It’s too bad Ubuntu went to shit, because there is one thing that’s nice about choosing it as your first distro: their version numbers are the date, which makes it really easy to remember exactly when you first started using Linux distros. April 2010 in my case.
But no, just go with Mint these days. Everything good about Ubuntu, none of the bad.
Mint might be easier to recommended in their next major release, but being stuck on x11 when all the optimisations are being made for Wayland (not to mention features a lot of new users might expect like HDR and fractional scaling). They’ve also recently had a problem with shipping outdated packages and leaving the repo/support links as is, leading to users reporting bugs which were fixed months or even up to a year ago.
They’re working on all of that to their credit, and their next release should fix most of those problems, but I’m hesitant to recommended Mint right now
Another nice thing about Unbuntu was that searching for “Ubuntu your-problem-here” usually gave good results. Sometimes it could be a 10 year old forum post that was still relevant.
Searching for “Linux Mint your-problem-here” is more likely to give less relevant results.
True, but Mint is close enough to Ubuntu that what solutions work for Ubuntu will likely work for Mint as well with little or no modifications.
I’m a beginner with linux but intermediate/advanced with windows and so far I’ve got limited experience with bazzite, cachyos, and linux mint. I think any of those 3 are easy enough for anyone to start with.
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Ok, hear me out.
It’s obvious that not everyone has the same needs and that new users are likely to be overwhelmed by instructions/tools that are highly technically involved, BUT
I think it’s actually quite valuable for others to question whether you actually want what you think you do, especially if you’re inexperienced. You know, the whole “you don’t know what you don’t know” spiel?
It’s still usually most helpful to get answers to the question you actually asked, but there’s a decent chance you will learn valuable context from suggestions that are only tangential and you might even realize that there are much better solutions to your problem, you just didn’t have the framework to even imagine them.There is a solution. Tell a person the answer to their question while also calling into question if they actually need what they are asking for. This cat wants to start hunting Mice. So that could go something like, “It’s great that you’re getting into hunting. Mice are an excellent place to start if you’re a house cat. Have you tried waiting outside of their hole? When I hunt elk, I creep up slowly on them when they are unaware. Mice are quite small game, but this might work for them too. Have you considered hunting elk?”
Dude that’s not how I was brought up in the Linux community. If you don’t discourage the kids today how will they respect your authority tomorrow? No better to destroy their egos now so they won’t be competition later. The LINUX community really died when we stopped being jerks to n00bs.
tl;dr - You’re too dumb.
/S
I hunt buffalo, btw
Sorry to be that guy, but arch = deer.
Buffalo = nixos / gentoo / hannahmontanaOS
Sorry to break it to you, but Gentoo is a penguin.
You fucker, we’re all pingus
A quick search did not yield me a Hannah Montana penguin, I’m severely disappointed in this community.
Ehh, having used all 3 Arch and Nix are about the same level of difficulty, Nix just doesn’t have documentation (or at least didn’t when I was using it). Flakes make it more complicated, but those are 100% optional, and I didn’t use them
Gentoo is a notable step up. Shit actually breaks there, horrendously. Still love it tho.
HMLinux does, in fact, scare me. I’m debating doing LFS, but I don’t think I could handle the difficulty that HML would offer
LFS is actually a pretty good learning experience. But that depends on whether you’re interested in topics like kernel configuration, filesystem organization, the boot components and boot sequence, init system, common app resources, compiling apps, and generally how a Linux system comes together. It gives you a solid grounding that’s applicable to any Linux distro (not super-specific like Arch/Gentoo/Nix tend to be). But it’s pretty dry stuff and you have to be really fascinated by Linux to dig into it.
On the cool side once you get through LFS you should be able to put together your own mini Linux distro and see how small you can make it and still boot and do something useful.
Yeah, I’m very interested in the user side of Linux, less so what’s under the hood. There’s some degree of it there, I do use Gentoo, which is more manual than any other distro I’ve come across, but that’s about as deep as I want to go for a daily driver. I am a little tempted to do LFS on a VM once I have a computer that can handle it again
Goddam that almost killed me. 🤣
but are you also a buff anthro lion?
Reddit fucking blows
This is pretty accurate; there are quite a number of furries in FOSS.
I started with Slackware. I currently use Void. Do not follow my path. Use Ubuntu, Mint, or Fedora.
I usually see the opposite (on reddit of course):
“I want to run Kali on my phone, plz help”.
“I am a Linux noob and went with Arch because I heard all the cool kids use it, now something bork”.
“Which distro???” (same question was last asked 4 hours ago)
can we just appreciate
looks like they’ve already found one mouse!
The big smol
It’s never “how * like”. It’s “what * like” or just “how *”
“*” meaning feels in this case.
Except the “big cats” are are actually hyena and by “hunt deer” they mean that they fight over a carcass.
Tbf hyaenas do a lot of their own hunting. I believe I’ve read that lions more often pillage from hyaenas than vice versa.
Down with lion propaganda, I say!
This isn’t entirely wrong, but sometimes you should just do the thing you want to do in the first place. For example, MOST distros are “new user friendly” these days. Mint is cool, but you don’t need to go to Mint first if you want to use, say, CachyOS. Rolling distros I’ve found to be actually EASIER to deal with. Literally just update regularly and you’re good. Don’t have to reinstall for an upgrade, or have outdated software with bugs that were patched 2 years ago. Obviously yeah, there are distro where you have to do or customize everything like Arch, Gentoo, or LFS, but most people don’t ever want to build up to that in the first place. If it has the featured you want, just try it. Nix is maybe one of the exceptions, but at the same time it’s so different so you’re not going to get a ton of transferrable skills from an easier distro anyway.
For a normie like me, i stick with Bazzite.
I’ve been at this Linux thing for maybe 20 years now. I’ve tried more distros than I can remember.
And after running Kinonite and Aurora for almost 2 years now, I tend to recommend any Atomic based distro or spin for newbies. They are stable and solid. While still allowing for users to easily choose their own software and install it with very little worry of burning the house down.
And Bazzite fits right in there. Easy install and it works well for gaming. Or choose Aurora if you are looking for a “regular” desktop experience, (that’s me). And they take care of your video card drivers because you choose your video card when you download the ISO.
Mint is nice and I will recommend it also, but Atomics are the way forward for newbies and those that either don’t want to tinker anymore or those that aren’t at that “Lemme see what it takes to break this” point.
Same here! I started with Lycoris back in 2003, I’m very experienced with many different distros. The universal blue distros (Aurora, Bazzite) are my preference these days. You get the benefits of the atomic host and they aren’t actually restrictive at all once you get comfortable using containers for software that you can’t easily install with flatpak or brew.
Yeah I just booted my main PC first with Gnome Bazzite (oopsies) and then again with KDE version… Works well, no notes. All my games, musics, discs, whatever, works. LMDE is great on my old-ass laptop tho.
I don’t really want to be the tiger but what do you do on immutable distros when you want to e.g. compile a C program from source (say, an SDL game). I always thought being able to easily install popular libraries from package manager a huge advantage of Linux over windows and mac.
I bet most newcomers wouldn’t even know what that means
Well I can see a newcomer finding a program they want to run on github and there are instructions for compiling the program for e.g. Ubuntu which if they were Fedora user they would be able to adapt to themselves without much trouble. But since they are using a distro that decided that installing packages globally is bad for some reason they are very much on their own. Sure I think it’s possible and there are methods documented somewhere (and maybe it’s even better practice than installing dependencies from package manager), but it seems unlikely that anyone in the program’s community can help unless they have experience with immutable distros.
I just wonder what are the benefits for which people are chosing distros that so deviate from what most other Linux users use.
Bazzite can provide a full user experience for 99% of the user base, who just want to get rid of Microsoft. Probably most of them would need to search the web to find out what it means to compile programs.
It’s a good question, and it has a definitive answer: Distrobox.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Distrobox/
You can also run applications from within the container. I have a Debian based container (but you can use whatever you prefer, I just happened to find a guide for getting jetbrains IDEs working well with a Debian one) with the Jetbrains suite installed and all of the development tools I need.
Since getting comfortable using distrobox, I prefer to use it for dev environments even when I’m not using an atomic distro. It doesn’t add any additional friction.
Are you asking an average user to compile programs?
If they can’t be downloaded fully functionally from the internet, they do not exist to them.
Bazzite really does “just work”, it’s so awesome.
I wish I had that experience, but I suppose it serves me right by being a complicated dude, I’m used to my stream deck software and I just got myself an xlr microphone, setting up all the broken out streams of audio was a bit of a mess and some of it I have to repeat every time, like Everytime I launch overwatch I have to replumb it to push audio to the game sink instead of system, while all other apps generally know their place on restart, then there was a bunch of work I put towards trying to read from my xlr stream using some plugin off of GitHub but the sandboxing is giving me nightmares because it needs hardware access to the audio stack. I just left that part alone for now because it already cost me an entire evening wrestling it when I was looking to have fun, I’ll get back to it eventually. Meanwhile my Gentoo server, my 2 Ubuntu servers, and my Linux mint machine(for my wife) all were fairly no muss no fuss.
I had the same complaint about auto mounting internal drives and the stupid KDE wallet system, both of those things got fixed at some point. Given enough time I’m sure your issues will be figured out as well. I will say that audio support does really suck at the moment though. I gave up on using my surround sound system for the time being.
Bazzite is the best
Chat, I need help. Since a couple updates ago, CaxhyOS isn’t focusing on Proton applications properly. If I click on a Proton window, it doesn’t actually focus it unless I first minimise all applications, or then minimise another application. It’s super annoying for alt-tabbing fullscteen games, since I have to go to the desktop before going into a game.
Curiously, I don’t think it happens with Bitburner, which lately I’ve had running all the time. So maybe it’s only happening with the second game I launch at a time? Not sure.
Lomg shot, but Steam games, including Proton games, will typically have the Steam overlay up. I don’t know how they implement the overlay, but if it’s via some kinda of floating transparent window, maybe it could interact oddly with focus in Kwin. Maybe try toggling the Steam overlay off, see if that does it?
What WM/DE are you using?
(i have no idea if I can help you but this is probably a helpful question for someone who can)
KDE Plasma with Kwin
Didn’t KDE just start accepting vibecode?Try running the applications inside Gamescope. It uses a separate toplevel window that shouldn’t be affected by whatever Proton is doing.
You could also try either enabling or disabling Wayland in Proton: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine#Wayland
It could also be a quirk of whatever Proton version you’re using. Try GE-Proton, Proton-EM, or an older version.
Is this all proton applications or have you only been playing one or a few games lately?
