Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that’s apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don’t do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
And also, what distro might be best for me?
Note here, a lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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 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, lmde 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.
I disagree. Obviously the most ideal solution would be the have immutable Mint, but beginners need stability more than they do immutability. I’ve used mint and my only issue with Mint was that I didn’t like how it looked. I’m currently on Bazzite and these are the issues I’ve ran into:
Every time I start Firefox it asks to be made into the default browser. Even if I click yes it will still ask again next time I start Firefox.
When using the default audio sometimes the audio signal to my monitor cuts off which means I no audio comes from the speakers. If I tell the system to send the audio to my other monitor and back to the one I have hooked on the speakers then it instantly works again. It’s almost like the system forgets it has to send out audio. I don’t remember what I did to fix it but it definitely wasn’t beginner friendly.
Sometimes one of the monitors freezes and only one. The second monitor keeps working just fine. So far haven’t found a permanent solution for this issue.
There have also been some minor artifacting that I personally don’t consider an issue but someone else might.
Overall I can put up with the issues because I’ve pretty much conceded that I’m going to have issues. But I don’t think new users should be using a system where they’re going to run into problems they’re most likely not equipped to fix. That why I recommend Mint to newcomers because all the fancy bells and whistles don’t matter if the system doesn’t work. Mint doesn’t have bells and whistles, but it just works.
Here’s the problem: what you just did can be done with literally any distro. There are anecdotal stories of every single distro on earth being broken. Even non-linux distros, windows and macos have such stories.
Do you have any actual statistical evidence that fedora works less often than mint?
I’ve given it to quite a few people and nobody has had any issues. There are anecdotal stories of literally every single distro failing for somebody, them going to another distro and it just working.
here’s a counter example: https://lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz/post/53716147/18213941
“UPDATE 2: Ok, Fedora seems waaaay more stable than Ubuntu (and Mint). No strangeness like before…”
And their problems were MUCH worse than yours.
I have cancelled out your one claim with this, we can’t make progress until there’s proper statistics, no amount of anecdotal stories will make fedora less stable or more stable than mint.
less up to date software is a double edged sword, if you don’t have statistics I don’t think you can really make the claim that mint just works when fedora/bazzite don’t.
Then there’s the things that are objectively broken in mint for everyone until cinnamon properly supports wayland:
We’ve already established that a lot of people will recommend Mint. What do you think, why do a lot of people recommend Mint?
Simple, it was the best choice for a long time and hasn’t done anything to piss people off.
it’s no longer the best choice but mint people are still happy so they still recommend it even though it is objectively the wrong choice to start with for a beginner.
We’ve was it the best choice?
Dunno, a long time ago at this point.
Stupid autocorrect. Why was it the best choice?
Back then ubuntu had pretty much all of linux cornered, the vast majority of distros were ubuntu based or ubuntu adjacent, and ubuntu was beloved, however, it came with a number of flaws, mint just rectified those flaws and was otherwise basically just ubuntu.
By being ubuntu based and getting rid of the stuff that made people angry, you ended up with a highly supported, beloved distro. These days things have changed, however, fedora is just as if not more well supported than ubuntu, same with arch based distros.
I agree I honestly don’t like immutable distro’s at all because you can’t install packages the way everyone else does: via package managers. You either have to use the gui software center and if that doesn’t have to app your looking for you have to use distrobox or box buddy which still doesn’t work half the time. That’s just been my experience with bazzite as a person fairly knew to linux.
this is false, rpm-ostree exists and works for this exactly. There’s nothing you can’t do on bazzite that you can do on a non-immutable distro.
Even if that wasn’t true… package management is just done through flatpak, there’s no real fundamental difference, it’s just an abstraction layer, I don’t see why that would be important to you at all, and comes with numerous benefits:
It not having packages you may need applies to any package management solution, other distros do not package everything either. In fact, the distro with the most packages is an immutable one, nixos.
Source?
It runs x11, the wayland port is going insanely slow, x11 has the following problems every time:
It may support these someday, maybe. But progress is absurdly slow. Considering cinnamon has fewer changes as a whole than just the KDE text editor alone, kde is a significantly better choice if you want a well-supported, bug-free and feature rich experience.
And Wayland isn’t very well tested yet. We should only give a very well tested display server to very new users. They must not get a bad impression
That would’ve been true 5 years ago. Wayland is plenty tested these days, give me some data indicating the rate of issues is significantly higher and I’ll agree, elsewise I think the most secure well supported option is the best one. X11 is being deprecated left and right for a reason.
gnome is wayland by default, kde is wayland by default, even XFCE is transitioning to wayland at this point… that’s just not a valid argument in the modern era.
If it’s still being tested, then it isn’t for very new users
It’s well out of the testing phase and used by default on both major desktops.