[Update: I went with CachyOS instead, it looks like a great option for gaming with general usage and has a really good wiki]
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.
After I left Bazzite as “my first Linux” I landed on Garuda. It is Arch based, is gaming and performance focused, comes with different desktop environment options, has pacman and works well with pamac, and has been noob friendly.
No ragrets.
I’ve been using bazzite for going on 2 years now and it’s still as good and as easy to use as it was the day I got it. I wouldn’t want to use anything else.
I just switched to bazzite a couple months ago after switching away from kubuntu. I love it, don’t expect I’ll ever go back, and I’m not interested in trying any others. It’s kind of a pain if you want to do things outside of gaming, due to the immutability of the os, but anything is still possible.
One thing I haven’t figured out yet is theming grub, nothing I’ve tried has stuck.
Bazzite 100%. It’s the best out of the box gaming distro, and bonus points for immutability (not that your friend needs to know what that is).
Bazzite 100%. It’s the best out of the box gaming distro
Does Mint require tinkering for games to work?
Yes a little bit if you have an Nvidia card, and Bazzite has the option to boot right into a Steam Deck like interface which is great for controller gamers.
To be clear Mint is a totally fine choice too, but for gaming and especially for a total Linux newbie Bazzite is the choice.
Yes a little bit if you have an Nvidia card
Interesting. I have an Nvidia card, but had no problems with Mint.
It was about a year ago so maybe it’s improved since then. One specific hiccup I recall with Mint that I didn’t have with Bazzite was getting acceleration in a browser. I’m certainly not recommending Nvidia users avoid Mint!
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.
Garuda linux everyday
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).
This was my opinion too. However like a year ago my best friend asked me: “Hey, I want to try linux. Which distro do you recommend?” I told him, that I recommend Linux Mint for beginners. And that I use Arch. Like a day later he wrote me again: “I’ve installed Arch, lol. Wasn’t that hard. The guide is actually very straight forward.”
This changed how I see Arch today. Arch isn’t super complex or hard to use. It’s just a bit more time consuming to set up. On the other hand it just works once set up.
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
You can access any package manager you want through distrobox then run the app directly from your host OS without really even noticing that’s what’s happening. This is how I run librewolf because it was givit me a weird lag on flatpak. The only way I remember it’s on distrobox is because it says so in the task manager.
Aside from that, you mostly use flatpak. You can also install local .RPMs and appimage. You can layer packages with rpm-ostree, which adds the package to your base OS image that is initialized at boot. They recommend that you try to avoid that if possible. I’ve only really needed to use it for things like VPN software. I don’t use brew.
You’re right about ujust. Bazzite comes with a bunch of premade “recipes” to make some things people often need easier. For example, “ujust update” updates everything including os image, firmware, drivers, flatpaks, packages, etc. all at once. Being immutable, nothing changes until you reboot. Rolling back is insanely easy, but I’ve only had to do it once (and it was my fault).
I’ve been using it for like a year and a half now and it’s almost boringly stable. People will say it’s limiting or restricting, but I disagree. You can do pretty much anything, the process just might be different.
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
Yes, but CachyOS might not be, and while it does a bit to make things substantially easier for your friend, you’ll have a lot of familiarity with it as an Arch user.
Source: An Arch user for 15 years who just installed CachyOS when I wanted to switch from Cosmic to KDE.
I’ve been using Pop!_OS for gaming for a couple years now and it’s been great. It’s Ubuntu-derived like Mint, and I haven’t had much difficulty troubleshooting it, since a lot of the stuff on Ubuntu/Mint forums will work for Pop.
You could put him on to cachy os, iirc it has graphical package management and is built on arch.
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.
I really like Bazzite and the universal blue project (Bluefin and Aurora) in general. It is the fastest way to get a stable, usable linux installation with a bunch of QoL tweaks without having to follow a “here’s top 10 things to do” guide after install. Starting from a stable install is the best way to get used to linux, imo. If you are coming from windows or a mac and the system borks itself or throws up wierd errors during installation or an update, or you have to follow a bunch of guides inputting commands you are unfamiliar with to get basic funcionality working, you aren’t going to trust the system enough to switch over to full time. A stable, well functioning system upon install is essential for new users.
It is very possible to do development work, however you will most likely need to be familiar, or willing to become familiar with, a containerized work flow. This is probably a good practice to get into regardless of distro you use. Bluefin/Aurora are specifically is targetted towards developers.
As far as packages go, you use bazaar for flatpak/gui apps, brew for CLI apps, distrobox for any random program from a different distro you might need, and podman for docker images. Layering is a last resort and should be reserved for apps that need to interact on a system level, most often VPNs with custom installers and some password managers.
Flatpak will be set up on install with decent defaults, so permission issues are less of an issue. Distrobox is also set up and easy to dive into if needed. Setting it up this way seperates user apps and system apps and makes the install much less prone to breaking un updates. It also updates in the system and flatpaks/brew apps in background without bothering the user, you just need to restart the machine every once in a while to upgrade to the next version, although this behavior can be modified with a simple terminal command.
Relying on flatpaks/brew means those apps will be up to date and you don’t have to wait sometimes months for the distro to get an upgrade, which can happen with non-rolling release distros. Since they are all fedora based, the system will be fairly up to date while not bleeding edge like a rolling release distro, so it is rare to experience kernel regressions or those types of issues.
The default file system is btrfs with seperate system and home partitions, and it’s set up to be able to roll back to a previous version from the grub menu if an update causes a problem. This is possible with other distros, but can take quite a bit of effort. I’ve done it in debian before and it was not intuitive, and if something went wrong after following the guide I followed, I would have no idea how to fix it and would just have to nuke the isntall and start over.
The main difference between the universal blue releases is that Bazzite has steam installed at the system level, and has Gnome, KDE, or KDE plus Steam Bigpicture modes available. Bluefin is Gnome focused, and Aurora is KDE focused, but steam is only available as a flatpak. It is easy to swtich between each release with a simple terminal command and there is almost no risk to your user files when you do so. It just swaps out the system layer and leaves your user partition alone.
This set up will not be limiting or cause problems unless you are wanting to explore different window managers or desktop environments outside of KDE or Gnome, or have an obscure device that the bazzite maintaners haven’t installed support for, or have to use a vpn with a custom installer that needs system access, or use a password manager that isn’t configured well in flatpak.
