wanting to hop into the world of linux on a dual boot method (one of my favorite games unfortunately cannot be run on linux at all, and it’s a gacha. I don’t want to gamble with my account being banned, so I’m keeping windows for it specifically.) this’ll be my second go at it, I used Pop!_OS briefly but had some issues with wifi and didn’t love the GNOME layout. I have a new distro picked out, but I just was curious what other people are using in this community. was also wondering what made you fall on your current one.
and maybe as some bonus questions, what are some distros you’ve tried but didn’t like? what about a distro you want to try eventually? I’ve seen distrohopping is a thing, hahaha.
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Manjaro
Easy to use and you can still legally say “I use Arch btw”
Bonus points for making Arch users seeth because you call Manjaro, Arch.
I think Fedora is the current best distro. I’ve used everything under the sun over time, and if you use linux for 20+ years, you’ll find you need to distro hop because every distro will get bad (and ideally good again).
I really like Fedora, but the release cycle is too fast for my tastes. Also I find Gnome distracting these days.
That’s why after 20+ years I use Mint or LMDE. I don’t have the time or interest to tinker the way I used to unless I’m getting paid for it. Mint was the thing that got me to leave Fedora.
Bazzite Linux running KDE Plasma 6. It’s a wonderful distro based on Fedora 40 (I think, still kinda new) and it’s made for gaming.
Hannah Montana Linux
I use EndeavourOS because I like having access to the AUR but didn’t want to risk messing up my Windows installation by trying to manually set up Arch for dual booting (this was before
archinstallwas made). I like it, and I like using KDE. My only complaint with it would be that pacman kinda shits itself if you go too long without updating.The first distro I ever used was ZorinOS back in like 2017.
I’ve tried a couple different KDE distros and settled on Fedora 40 KDE spin. It seems to be the most complete KDE experience without all of the Canonical/snap bloat. It works great on my Thinkpad. Also runs decent on my gaming desktop using the latest Nvidia beta driver - I used to get stutters and artifacts in games/steam/plex and now with the beta driver those apps run fine
If you like or need the latest software, use a rolling distro. I use Manjaro (boo, hiss) and really like it. But if you don’t want the Arch users to beat you up and pants you, I hear Endeavour OS is pretty good.
Mint 21.3 as my main Desktop OS - almost zero complaints after over a year. Everything just works.
Ubuntu using Linux-Surface on my old Surface Pro. Breathed new life into a device I had abandoned (after all 8gb of ram isn’t enough for Windows malware these days). Gnome works really nice on a touchscreen two-in-one. Kudos to the Linux-Surface folks. They took one of the few positive developments from Microsoft (Surface hardware) and made it possible to remove the worst part (windows). Not that I’ll ever buy a Surface again. It also allowed me to retire my iPad.
Fedora Linux on a cheap Dell laptop as my media client. Fedora is nice and runs well, haven’t done too much with it other than Firefox and Calibre. Nice to see a different ‘branch’ in action.
I’m pretty basic and generally lazy so I don’t delve into some of the smaller distros or distro hop. Maybe later I’ll do it with VMs, but eh not sure it’s my kind of hobby. Too many other things to do.
Best of luck and let us know how it goes.
Seconding this experience with Mint 21.3, although on a laptop here. I just wanted something that works without much fucking about, and it delivers.
Yes! Linux Mint is such a great project - it made me excited to get on my desktop again.
Debian is mine and has been for decades + I’m a little bit happy to see it’s still well represented / well thought of in the community. Everything works, and you can choose new + exciting with headaches sometimes, or old + stable with no headaches but old.
Only real issue is the package management hasn’t kept pace with node / python / go / everything else wanting to do its own little mini package management, and so very occasionally that side is a little bit of a mess
NixOS I would like to try at some point as the core philosophy seems a little more suited to the modern (Docker / pip / etc) era, but I never messed with it
I recently switched to Debian and use nix to install / provide the likes of node / python / go for development.
Wait, how does that work? Can you do Nix package management on a Debian system or something?
Yes, you can just go ahead and install nix in your distro to use e.g.
nix-shellto create a development environment.
Debian testing on my desktop
Endeavour on my laptop
Gonna switch desky to endeavour soon. Debian stable is great but testing is not a good experience but I need the more recent packages.
Give Debian Sid an opportunity.
one of my favorite games unfortunately cannot be run on linux at all, and it’s a gacha. I don’t want to gamble with my account being banned
Yeah, let’s keep it to one kind of gambling. I like and use opensuse tumbleweed. Rolling release, never had stability problems.
I recently stumbled upon OpenSuse again and want to try it out but can’t decide if I should use Tumbleweed or MicroOS. Did you ever try MicroOS?
Stick to Tumbleweed. MicroOS is the container version.
I thought MicroOS is like Fedora Silverblue and an atomic desktop?
They are very similar. It honestly comes down to what you’re comfortable with.
Can you elaborate? I think I didn’t understand your point.
I’m not the one you asked your question, but I think I understood what they meant.
First of all, technically MicroOS is the non-desktop version of openSUSE’s take on an atomic/immutable distro. The desktop variants are referred to as Aeon (for GNOME) and Kalpa (for KDE).
Secondly, while Aeon/Kalpa definitely is to openSUSE what Silverblue/Kinoite is to Fedora, there’s a clear difference in vision and maturity.
Vision
Fedora Atomic is a very ambitious project; everything points toward it being Fedora’s take on NixOS. But, unlike NixOS, it couldn’t start from scratch nor did they intend to. Instead, it’s the process of evolving their existing products into something special. As such, it has been over two years since Fedora has even explicitly stated that they intend for Fedora Atomic to become the default eventually (without saying anything about sunsetting the old). While, AFAIK, openSUSE has yet to make similar statements regarding Aeon/Kalpa.
Maturity
Everything points towards Fedora Atomic being more mature than openSUSE MicroOS; work on the project has started earlier, Fedora Atomic is almost done with their transition (from image-based) to OCI while I don’t recall openSUSE mention anything regarding their transition (from ‘snapshots’) to image-based since they mentioned it briefly last year. Furthermore, Bazzite (based on Fedora Atomic) has become the face of Gaming Linux while openSUSE’ MicroOS fails to deliver on anything but Aeon. Which, to be fair, is absolutely fine. But not everyone is fan of GNOME.
So, use Tumbleweed if:
- You prefer the traditional model
- You like YaST
- You like the rolling release model and not being tied to GNOME
Use Aeon if:
- You like GNOME and an atomic distro on a rolling release distro
- You prefer the opinionated, hands off, little to no customization path that openSUSE has currently chosen for its Aeon
- You like a containerized future
Use Fedora Atomic if:
- You want an atomic distro, but don’t like any of the decisions made for Aeon; i.e.
- prefer to use KDE, Budgie or Sway (or any other desktop environment through uBlue)
- aren’t that big of a fan of container workloads
- prefer having the choice of installing native packages
- Prefer atomic on top of a point release distro
Finally, regarding containers specifically; let’s say you want to install package X.
- On Tumbleweed, you just do
sudo zypper install Xand you’re done with it. - On Aeon, if it’s available as a Flatpak, you do
flatpak install X. If there’s no Flatpak of it, you install it within a container that you access through Distrobox. Within the container, use the package manager corresponding to the container. Technically, while inside the container, the environment is very similar to Tumbleweed. So, say you got a Tumbleweed container, then you can continue usingsudo zypper install X. - On Fedora Atomic, you can layer onto the system through
rpm-ostree install X; this is very close to how installing packages work on Tumbleweed. And, you can continue using both Flatpak and Distrobox; like how it’s done on Aeon. Note that Tumbleweed also allows access to Flatpak and Distrobox. So, Aeon is most restricted as it can’t install packages onto the base system. Btw, Fedora Atomic accomplishes this through layers that can also be peeled off later on (through uninstalling for example). With this, the base system actually isn’t affected, but the end user doesn’t notice it.
Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.
this is actually what I’m going to be giving a go! I have very little experience (I have servers that run Debian and DietPi, but I get help with those) with linux but I’m really excited to give the KDE version a try. and I’ve been trying to learn, too, because also my partner is going to be moving to a dual boot setup as well. been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot too, especially while my desktop is out of commission.
do you find that anything is missing in Bazzite for you?
The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.
The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.
I really like KDE. As a long time Windows user, it feels so much more natural than Gnome.
I just installed Bazzite over the weekend on my main computer. It’s definitely not the smooth experience that Windows is, but I’m hoping I can get used to it and keep using it.
It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!
Linux mint it just works.
Nobara
Endeavour and KDE.
Like the look of it. Easy to update, no bloatware or games reinstalled.
If I do swap again it’d probably be back to Mint. I had some issues a while ago and moved to MX. That worked well but there was so much guff. Tried Endeavour about a year ago and have been here ever since.
