Hello guys i have a qustion about which distro i should use?
I want to dual boot windows and linux
I just want a safe place away from microsoft eyes to do edit and drawing and other hobbies on my pc. And playing some games like cs2 & 2d games Also the distro run my wallpaper engine Should be popular distro so if i have a problem i can ask about it
Please dont tell me linux mint because i tried it 3 times and everytime i do anything simple the distro goes off and i should re install i won’t give it anymore chances thank you 😖
Edit: thank you guys for typing your suggests. after some search i will give bazzite try and if won’t work like i want. I will go with the other suggests I really enjoyed reading all your suggests
Based on your last paragraph, you might fall in the supernoob catergory. You’ll want an immutable distribution, you can’t break those Unless you tell it to let you break it.
As a windows user, you’ll find familiarity in Fedora Kionite.
If you prefer a touchscreen oriented experience consider Fedora Silverblue.
There’s a few other options on the page I’m linking, I haven’t tried and therefore can’t recommend either of the others.
https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
Edit: my formatting was 🗑️
Edit 2, electric boogaloo:
OP in your post you state you want Wallpaper Engine to work, unfortunately, you’ll have issues there. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with wallpaper engine you may be able to do the same using KDE Plasma. I personally use a VLC command line call to enable animated wallpapers on my rig, there’s not exactly a standard for it on Linux so many of the solutions you find will be clunky. Just remember if you go around messing with your xorg.conf file you need to have a backup of it so you can undo changes easily in a terminal.
You’re welcome to DM me if you need assistance.
I was under the impression that the fedora atomic distros are hard to dual boot on a single drive.
Historically yes, but this appears to not exactly be the case any longer.
Reference https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/284
There does appear to be a way to do it, from a cursory glance at the above it seems that Fedora and Windows need to have separate EFI partitions, I’m not all that invested though (I don’t use these distros nor do I dual boot) so I don’t really care to look much deeper.
I think immutable is great for everyone, I struggle to find a point against it but maybe I’m a supernoob too hahaha (I use NixOS, btw)
For a more gaming-ready experience, Bazzite might suit you:
People seem to love bazzite, is it all its cracked up to be?
I’m happy with my lmde htpc/server/gamingrig/clusterfuck so I’m not planning on changing, but I’ve been in the market for a handheld gaming PC and its been on my list to try.
Bazzite is just kinoite / silverblue repackaged as Universal Blue, and then modified to preinstall some qol apps and settings. So if you like the original, but don’t want to start with a blank slate, want the nice things out of the box, start with Bazzite/bluefin/aurora (gaming/gnome/KDE).
For people who know what they’re doing/want, starting blank slate makes sense. For newbies or people who don’t feel like dealing with that 🙋🏼♂️ the latter is a better recommendation imho
I mainly use my Bazzite machine for gaming and it was rough at first (~1 year ago) but it seems like compatibility has made leaps and bounds recently. I don’t play a ton of different games but I’ve had to do very little tweaking to make them work. 90% have been install-and-play. Usually ProtonDB can help you work out the kinks.
grumpy graybeard/neckbeard here but bazzite and bluefin feel like what I wanted out of Linux 25-30 years ago and I’m so glad we’ve reached this point.
I put Bazzite on an Intel n100 box I’m using as an HTPC. Super easy install and it was ready to go and working just fine very quickly. Jellyfin works really well! It really is quite incredible how far things have come since my first install of Ubuntu 14.04. Atomic could really make some headway on making Linux easy for a typical user. Wine has come a LOOOONG way help keep compatibility too.
Way better than my Ubuntu desktop. The only thing hold me back on putting an atomic distro on my desktop is not familiar with how things like Python venvs would work for development. That and I use a global hotkey program for Team speak since they haven’t updated to handle Wayland global keys.
As a noob I really like it. I ran popOS for almost a year, then arch for like two months. I tried fedora for like a week before arch but then decided to try bazzite on a little htpc for the living room, then put it on my main gaming desktop, now I have it on my laptop where I edit photos and videos as a hobby and its been pretty solid.
I don’t really like that it wants you to use flatpaks for everything, since darktable as a flatpaks kept crashing and rapid photo downloaded didn’t have a flatpak so I ended up installing stuff with the ostree rpm but rapid photo is old and not sure how to update it to current version
You can use distrobox to install a version meant for another distro, afaik
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Or maybe they’re just genuinely a fan?
I don’t even like fedora ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just thought it’d be easier.
Ah I see, pretty far from a shill then lol
Buddy I’ve got my pronouns in my username please don’t misgender me.
Additionally, your response is needlessly hostile. You’ve offered no additional information and have chosen my comment to be a naysayer on presumably only because it is the top comment on the post. You’ve contributed nothing but vitriol to this thread.
I couldn’t give two shits what distros people use, and I’m not a fucking shill. OP wanted a suggestion, I gave 4. I used tobhse Fedora because it’s easy, with a large community, and with the bleeding edge release cycle the newest libraries became available more easily without enabling testing repositories or using sketchy PPAs that haven’t been vetted.
If OP weren’t noob, and weren’t someone who has already broken a mint install three times I’d have recommended that use something Debian based or Arch based, but they are, so I didn’t.
Yeah, those people who use and recommend it are just in the pocket of Big Fedora!
ZorinOS maybe ?
Bazzite is great for gaming !
Nobara too.
I just installed Nobara in a similar setup for similar reasons a few days ago after having several bad experiences with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint. I wanted to move away from Ubuntu-based distros and Nobara seems like it’s focused on gaming (frequent updates, etc). It’s been… I dunno if great is the right word, but pretty good. I run into difficulties of some variety with almost everything I do (can’t install battle.net in lutris because it hangs at 45%, lutris can’t log into epic games store, etc), but I’ve also found solutions for them without too much trouble and the games that I have managed to install run great.
Yeh I don’t think Nobara is beginner friendly. I’d say my experience was the same as yours. Difficulties with lots of things, but could find solutions. Given it wasn’t my primary PC, and I don’t have time for that - gone for mint (needed some stale stale kernl)
To be fair that was also my experience with PopOS which is designed to be user-friendly. The answer to questions like ‘how do I take a screenshot of a region and copy it to clipboard without spamming files’ or ‘how do I switch audio devices between speakers and headset’ just tends to be ‘run this long-ass command you would never have figured out on your own’ or ‘Write a shell script full of such commands to do it for you and call it with a shortcut key’. I think this is a linux problem, not a distro problem, because it was the same way when I was using redhat 15 years ago or slackware 30 years ago.
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
You say not to suggest mint, but you most probably used an Ubuntu based Mint so that doesn’t count.
Try Manjaro. It will be the easiest to set up and find software that hasn’t been deliberately packaged for your setup.
Clearly this comment is unpopular but it sure would be handy if anyone took the time to say why
(I used to be a Manjaro user)
Let’s say Manjaro has a bad history and a lot of people don’t take them seriously anymore and trust them even less.
At the very least it is quite a messy distro to use.
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I’ve been thinking about making the switch. How difficult do you find it to play steam games on your setup?
I switched to Linux Mint like a month ago and Inhad no problems at all. Valve pushes Linux a lot since the Steamdeck. Had not a single problem with a game. I even played Itch.io games. Just set the compatability options to proton and most stuff will run fine. Online Multiplayer games do make problems though. They have kernel based anti cheat and that is not supported. If you are unsure check this website for the games you play: https://www.protondb.com/
LMDE (mint sans ubuntu) user here, gaming is a dream, but sometimes a nightmare. You may need eventually to manually update the graphics card driver If you’re on Nvidia, as the debian repos it pulls from are hella out of date. Otherwise, smooth sailing.
You’ll likely only encounter problems on native games, Feral ports specifically seem to assume people have a libraries that they don’t, so I often find myself launching their games in a terminal a million times to figure out what libraries are missing and manually link them or just copy them into the game lib folder.
For me was difficult i tried to run rust using proton and tried to run some games on it like the witcher 3 beatblock and inscryption some games work and the others no i fix it and make all of them run but still after playing sometime i have crushes and black screen and even just the game desied to close and not work i wasnt care that much on gaming on linux but sometimes i just wanted to open the game for a minutes but nope
OP specifically declines to use Linux mint, per their final point in their post. As a 2 decade user who is currently using Mint, OP is right. The windows experience is so handholdey that new users often aren’t familiar with even HOW to research to fix their problems. Mint, a distribution that gives you training wheels but will not hold your hand is not ideal for someone who has already broken it several times, doing activities they didn’t feel were necessary to share.
OP needs an immutable distro.
I suggest you to check out Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. I have been using it for years without any problems. I also have dual boot with Windows, but I think I will delete Windows soon and use only Linux.
My name is none of your business, and I approve this suggestion.
For most of us using Linux distros for years, we already have a preferred distro that is highly unlikely to be Ubuntu or even Debian based, but for first-timers, I honestly believe Mint is the way to go. But seeing how mint has been a flop for you (as another poster said, it’d be great to know what went wrong) an immutable distro (like Bazzite) would fit your current needs better, but these distros are not the best way to start learning about Linux and eventually migrate from Windows entirely.
Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.
MX Linux
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I have to give it that the Fedora distros are a slightly bit superior to Ubuntu variants but for those that value some degree of not favoring corporate US (IBM/Red Hat) that provides AI resources for Israel’s military to do what it is doing… Myself I tried to like Mint, I really did… but could not… not just it is old-fashioned looking but has limitations with scaling and others.
Now, I do recognize for the initiators is it great! Now, for those that find Mint ugly I recommend TuxedoOS… I find it as good as Kubuntu but without its known limitations with flatpaks. Yes, TuxedoOS was created for Tuxedo laptops but they left it open to use it with others so no problems at all and very well maintained. Now, you may want remove the Tuxedo app that they installed just to free some resources… a 10-seconds thing to do. Drawback is servers in Germany so a bit slower updates than usual for most.
If your computer can’t handle Linux Mint, then either you do something wrong, or your computer is really unstable. I won’t ask you to use Mint, but I will say, that I use it on three different computers, and not a single problem anywhere. Dual-boot is notoriously unstable - mostly due to MS… So my advice is, to use a computer for Linux by it self…
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I dunno, I started with Debian and then many months later learned that it was one of the harder distributions given the outdated packages.
Glad I chose Debian because Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, PureOS, etc are all derivatives of it.
I suggest BazziteOS. I have it installed on 2 of my computers for about a year and it works great. It runs KDE and it looks similar to Windows but is much better. Also, I believe it has support for Wallpaper Engine, though I haven’t tried it.
It is Fedora based and Fedora also has a sizeable community for any questions and tutorials you may have.
The reason why I recommend Bazziteos is because it comes out of the box ready for gaming, you would have steam, wine, lutris, etc installed almost instantly and ready to play.
I just finished downloading bazzite and now creating a backup on flash for both bazzite and windows using ventoy because i know myself i will do something stupid to make me re install systems
Chances are that, if you do break something, it’ll be on the Windows side.
Bazzite is very solid for new users as it’s very convoluted to access and modify anything system related.
Having said that, if you have any intention to learn how to use Linux distros, and eventually remove Microsoft from your life, immutable distros like Bazzite will limit you dramatically, so I suggest you start with a regular “mutable” distro. Now, if your intention is just to have something that works, scape Windows every now and then, and come back to Windows, it’s hard to beat an immutable distro.
I’m pretty sure you can also advance with Bazzite. I haven’t done anything too advanced, but I can imagine one can learn a lot simply by learning the ujust commands as they would apt.
Absolutely. Maybe I’m a bit biased. I can’t stick to anything immutable (other than my Steam Deck, and believe me, I’ve tried many times), and always come back to distros I can have absolute control over.
However, I have all my employees running Silverblue (mostly because none of them even know what CLI means 🤣).
