A coworker of mine asked me to help him install Linux, he hasn’t tried Linux before but he’s sick of Windows.
He is very much into gaming, so gaming support is the first priority. He is also a developer/tester so I suppose that he will also want to have access to dev tools, languages, and other packages like that for personal projects.
My first go-to when recommending to newbies is Mint because it’s simple, tried and tested, but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience. However it scares me that there’s no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks and brew, or even podman images. Will this be a problem as he uses the OS for general usage besides gaming in the long term, would it be better to just go with Mint and set that up for gaming instead?
Feel free to also recommend other distros, but keep in mind that while he is technical, he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
I use CachyOS for over a year. Mainly for playing.
I went with mint, had mininal troubles getting gaming setup and still a good none gaming experience. Show him how to customize his desktop a bit i really enjoyed trying cool themes to fit the gaming vibe.
I have been using bazzite for over a year, and I am very happy with it. It works very well for gaming, and I have had zero troublehooting outside of getting some mod managers to work.
But immutable distros are different, in general you can’t just install GUI programs if it has no flatpak option. (for CLI stuff there are distroboxes). There are ways, but depending on what you want to do other than gaming, I would check first. Also there have been some episodes of drama among the maintainers, which makes me worry a bit about the future of the distro.
Mint is a great distro too, and from what I hear it for sure it will work well for gaming. I’d say the main differences are:
Bazzite:
- immutable, so you never have a broken setup
- lots of gaming setup done out-of-the-box
- some package installation restrictions
- some maintainer drama
Mint:
- flexible to use various methods of package installation
- No drama (?)
- Not immutable, so it can break if you fiddle with stuff and are careless
- no out-of-the-box gaming setup (but it is not a giant project to setup)
He should start with Mint, learn the system in general, and then move to Bazzite, CachyOS, Pika or Nobara, which are more game centric.
If he’s a dev, he probably is able to follow this guide:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guideThe result is a system, that has virtually every package you can imagine in the aur, always the newest packages - which is quite important for gaming performance and a really slim system.
For the gaming part I recommend Gamescope:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GamescopeAs desktop Plasma is a good choice for beginners. However I personally use Sway.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Plasma
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SwayI installed Arch for the very first time this past weekend. I am a software engineer with almost 30 years experience and some time less with Linux. I did my research beforehand: I watched a manual installation on YouTube and I went over the wiki.
And the manual installation was hard. I would not recommend it to a beginner.
he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
This isn’t Arch, sorry. My own Arch didn’t boot the first time (but yes I was able to fix it quickly).
I’ve tried many distros, Bazitte is by far the best for gaming without having to tinker. Fedora is not a good option imo because nvidia drivers are a pain in the ass.
I’d recommend he dual boot. Bazitte strictly for gaming due to it’s lack of traditional package management. And arch, Debian, or Fedora for coding.
I personally use PopOS for work stuff as well.
Since gaming is the first priority, does he play competitive multiplayer games? Better check their anticheat state first, as some just flat out deny linux, full stop.
I have no real recommendation in regards of distro, but afaik either should do.
And what I gather, Bazzite has package management ‘ujust’ https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/ - but beyond this hastily googled doc, I have no idea, never used Bazzite.
ujust is not a package manager, the way I understand it from this thread is that it’s just a convenience script that internally will use one of the other methods shown in the doc you mentioned (brew or flatpak for example). So it still seems risky to me not to have access to common linux package managers besides brew
Recommend the one you use yourself so you are able to help them in the best way possible.
This is usually a good idea, but I think Arch would be a bit too much for him
Still, any Debian derivative would be just as easy for me to help and also for him to find help online, so that’s the main reason I’d choose Mint over Bazzite
This is the correct approach, OP. Bazzite is good, but its immutability is an aspect one needs to get used to and learn to work with. Since you’re not (and I’m not saying I am ;), rather stick to something you feel comfortable supporting, because you’ll be the one they’ll come running to if they have a problem.
I moved my gf to Kubuntu, all she knows is double click starts her games, open konsole - press up arrow - hit enter to start the G13 kb and every so often click that round icon with the blue dot for updates whenever she feels like it (or something stops working). Oh yeah, kernel level anti-cheat is a dead stop under linux, if he plays any of them, he needs windows so far as I know.
I put flatpak as the default instead of snap (10 seconds), she is now as comfortable as she was under windows, I have also not needed to support her much (except for the stuff I forgot to setup). and for the love of god make sure you show your friend “TimeShift” can’t say enough how great that app is, you can
break almost anythingtinker to your hearts content and recover in minutes
he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
Of the two options you gave, I’d go with Mint. If your friend runs into a problem, it would probably be easier to diagnose the issue since it’s just Ubuntu/Debian under the hood.
Once they get used to it, they can try other gaming specific distros if they want to try to get a little more performance.
Bazzite is install and use. Perfect out the box experience
Mint for the community support. He’ll have tons of resources if he runs into anything and you’re not available. As a dev he should be resourceful in that regard.
But definitely check the kinds of games he’s playing. Modern multiplayer games will be a big hurdle if they’re not steam verified.
People who want to play games with kernel level anti-cheat won’t be happy with Linux. If that’s a must, they’d need to look for other solutions. For all others, Mint is great to get started. Most people just want their computer to work with minimal hassle. That’s what Mint excels at.
I agree with this. I even went with LMDE instead of the main Mint and there have only been a few small things I had to really fiddle with to get working how I wanted.
Having so much documentation that is actually correct and useful is a godsend to a noob like me.
Bazzite has newer drivers, ditto for CachyOS Handheld Edition for another SteamOS clone.
Can recommend nobara. Has all the game focused stuff bazzite has but it’s just regular old fedora with the dnf package manager underneath.
Nobara does seem pretty cool
In order of ease of use; Nobara (Fedora based), popOS (Mint/Ubuntu based), cachyOS (Arch based, easy enough to use but might be overwhelming because of the amount of linux jargon going on) over bazzite, depending on your friend ability and wish to tinker around with his OS.
I have had problems even dragging dropping files across apps in bazzite and other immutable distros like bluefin. If your friend is interested in tinkering just a little bit then he will be be banging his head across a wall with bazzite. The community support for these relatively new immutable distros is also quite bad when it comes to edge cases.
I strongly disagree with the order. To me, nobara has broken more than any of these (quite frequently actually), pop os is clunky and not intuitive, cachy is surprisingly the most stable for me and easiest despite it being arch based. Bazzite I use on my home living room computer and it’s been pretty solid. I’m a little concerned with it though because I believe they are having some maintainer issues that might impact future releases.
I switched from win11 to nobara about 2 months ago and so far am really happy with it. Anything i should look out for that could avoid ‘breaking’ it?
Once I tried to install a different desktop environment and that didn’t go well. Another time it just… Stopped working? I hadn’t changed anything. It seemed like a Nvidia thing but I never did recover it. Ended up doing a fresh install. If you’re 2 months in you’ve done better than I did! It might just not like my machine
I’m running on AMD hardware, which might help. However, I thought Nobara offers a special edition for NVIDIA GPUs to ensure better compatibility. Also, from what I understand, there’s a lot of optimization under the hood in Nobara, and it’s recommended not to change the base packages. Maybe this does include the desktop environment as well…
Yeah I thought it would be great and bought into the hype. It ended up being one of the more frustrating distros for me. Maybe your right about the de being included in base packages? Regardless, it lost me after the second issue. On cachy now and happy. Plus I really like the little terminal update animation thing if pacman C eating the progress bar.
I would also be frustrated, if it did break twice. Happy to hear you found something that works. I also found CashyOs really interesting. What turned me away was the fact that it is based on arch and I read everywhere that arch is hard for newcomers to Linux. But maybe this does not apply to cachy. If nobara should break some day, i think this will be the next distro I will test.
Try both, test it yourself. And then try CachyOS as well. I do recommend and use Bazzite and cachyos. Both are great. But it takes time. Like the first time with windows. Its a totally new chapter, if new to linux. Try all 3 for a week. See how it works.
