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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.
In the context of the comment, “do shit” is explicitly not anything to do with the OS or packages or repos.
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.
+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
Removed by mod
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.
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 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.
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 come 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
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.
Desktop? Debian with GNOME. Laptop? Debian with GNOME. Tablet? Debian with GNOME. Server? Believe it or not, Debian without GNOME.
I will never understand people who willingly subject themselves to Debian when there are so many better alternatives
Which tablet do you have?
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.
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?”).
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.
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.
: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.
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.
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.
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 don’t know how long I’ve used Debian at this point.
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 ones 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’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:
- 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
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 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
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.
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.
