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.
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.
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.
since there’s several issues that have proven unsolvable for me
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:
Thank you!
- I can understand why the random long load-times for apps is very frustrating. I don’t recall other Bazzite users complaining about it. So I don’t know how widespread the problem is.
- I’ve effectively been on GNOME ever since I made the jump to Linux. So I can’t comment on Dolphin.
- I can 100℅ relate to windows not restoring their prior states. I’ve used a tiling window manager extension on GNOME just because it handled that more gracefully; I like them maximized anyways.
- The audio sink thingy should have been available as a toggle by now. It’s unfortunate that it seemingly hasn’t. Though, I do wonder if pavucontrol would have been sufficient. There seems to be a flatpak for it if you’re interested.
- The developer experience on Flatpak leaves a lot to be desired 😅. FWIW, I prefer that within a distrobox.
- For GameMaker, installing it within a Ubuntu distrobox would probably have been sufficient.
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.
Headless: debian
Gui: mint
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.
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?
The only downside of Mint is outdated packages.
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:
- A more user-friendly installer (I know Debian’s has improved with Trixie, but Mint’s is still easier IMO).
- A newbie friendly welcome screen that walks them through setting up a snap shot back-up tool, theming, updates, firewall, as well as easily providing a link to help documents, and shows the user the software center exists.
- The excellent Mint Software Centre Appstore (I don’t think that comes with Cinnamon on a standard Debian install, I think it’s just the terminal).
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.
Definitely mint for “just works”, personally used it on loads of computers and haven’t encountered any issues
Been on Bazzite for a while now. Have never been happier in Linux. I’m a software engineer and occasional gamer for context
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
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[5] recommendation for atomic distros:- Bazzite[6]
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 —[7] be it through their Discord, Discourse or sub
reddit— then simply pivot to the traditional distros.
Attracts most noobs and is probs the most popular out of these; no-brainer. Lack of proper Wayland support and not offering (!) a (semi-)rolling release model are the only reasons why the others deserve to be on this list. Otherwise this would sweep clean. ↩︎
If you want something slow-moving, but still need/want Wayland. ↩︎
Arch-based distro, but comes with very sane defaults. Recommended if you’re on very new hardware. ↩︎
Relatively bare-bones. Especially compared to all the other distros found on this list. But, if you want a more minimalist approach while preserving excellent defaults, then this is definitely it. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
This probs deserves a footnote of its own in which I elaborate, but I got tired. Here, have a flower; 💮. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
what is wayland and how important is it?
what is wayland
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.
how important is it?
Very. Basically, either it or its ‘predecessor’[1] X11 is involved whenever you want to display/render anything[2] 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[3] of the surrounding ecosystem.
The term is used loosely here, because there’s a very big difference between the two. ↩︎
Which, to be clear, happens literally all the time. Unless your display needs don’t go beyond what was already available on MS-DOS*. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Thank you for the intro, that helped. Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant
Thank you for the intro, that helped.
Glad to hear it was helpful.
Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant
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/Feature X11 Wayland Architecture Multi-program chain (X Server + WM + Compositor) Single unified Compositor handles everything Render Method RAM multi-copy — pixels duplicated per frame Zero-copy GPU — same buffer start to finish Security Model Open trust — any app sees all input and screen Isolated by design — apps see only their own window Screen Tearing Common — vsync not guaranteed by protocol Eliminated — compositor controls frame delivery HiDPI / Fractional Scaling Inconsistent — requires per-app configuration Per-display — clean scaling built into protocol Multi-Monitor HDR Limited — retrofitted support only Full support — designed from the ground up SSH Remote Display Native — X forwarding works out of the box Needs external tools (e.g. Xwayland, RDP) GUI Automation Tools Rich ecosystem — xdotool, wmctrl, AutoKey Limited — protocol restricts cross-app access Legacy App Support Full native support XWayland compatibility bridge NVIDIA Driver Support Stable — long-established Good — driver series 495 and above Battery Efficiency Higher overhead — extra RAM copies per frame Lower overhead — GPU buffer reuse Development Status Maintenance-only since 2024 Actively developed — expanding scope Regarding its architecture, the table says about Wayland the following
Single unified Compositor handles everything
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.
display manager. it’ll cause issues with switching applications and rendering and such. Wayland is the direction everyone is going.
Wayland is replacing X11 at a rate where quality control isn’t there.
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
Anything “immutable”
- ublue family: Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin
- Fedora Atomic family: Silverblue, Kinoite, …
- KDE Linux (experimental)
- OpenSuse MicroOS (for servers, but possible to add a desktop)
- SteamOS (limited hardware compat)
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.
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
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.
