I ended up with Nobara
As some of you already know I’ve been playing around on a small partition with Linux Mint. Learned basic troubleshooting and fixed some driver issues.
Now I’m very impressed with how it runs and decided to daily Linux and keep Windows for things Linux can’t do. Currently installing Windows on a new small SSD as we speak. (240Gb for the OS plus it’s gonna get a 500GB NTFS partition on my 2TB gaming drive)
This brings me to my question. Which Distro? I’ve narrowed it down to keep using Mint or Fedora KDE Plasma 41. Mint is something I’ve already screwed around with and there’s loads of guides online about it.
But Fedora seems like a better for for me. I’m not afraid of tinkering at all. But as long as I came game and daily it for browsing, emails etc. without too much issues, I’m good.
What’s the consensus? Setting it up tonight after my new W11 install is up and running.
You’re going to get a hundred different answers about distros. There are a lot of knowledgeable people who forget what the beginner experience is like.
Mint is universally recommended and well loved. It works well and you can’t go wrong. It uses Cinammon desktop environment and I wanted KDE so I didn’t go for it.
Fredora is also top tier and again you can’t go wrong. This comes in many flavours (including Bazzite which is an immutable Fedora distro pre-set towards gaming, or Nobara).
When you’re wiping your drive anyway and setting up new and fresh, then this is the best time to install different distros and test drive them for a few hours/days. Ultimately this is not a life changing decision; and your choice can always be changed later.
I personally did all this a year ago and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been great and this distro doesn’t get recommended enough. The desktop environment will be your daily use experience. The underlying distro will be your mechanics under the hood. I would suggest you pick something “beginner friendly” unless you really want to take on a steeper learning curve.
OpenSUSE is awesome, they’re undergoing a restructuring and rebranding right now. Which means that promotion of use and updates could be slow or even pause. They were asked to return to the community for a new governance model. They should emerge the other side with a different name and branding, as SUSE asked them to stop using the name. It’s a transition time for the distro.
Mints outdated drivers can definitely cause issues for beginners.
It did definitely do that for me. Tried that and Pop.
Luckily this community helped me figure it out together with information found searching the web. If I wasn’t persistent and somewhat tech savvy I’d be stuck for sure.
And this is why Linux is still far from mass adoption. Normie’s will not be able to troubleshoot this stuff right out of the box. If there’s going to be widespread adoption then Linux needs to come pre-installed and set up, and preferably unbreakable (like Steam OS).
I’ve been using Mint for a while now, Haven’t had any issues so far. What issues did you have?
The kernel doesn’t support Mesa 25 drivers out of the box, so Radeon 9000 cards wouldn’t work properly. No games would run. Also the version of Steam downloaded directly from their website didn’t want to start, no window shows up and it just runs in the background.
Easy fix after a quick
GoogleQwant search. But someone who doesn’t have at least some deeper experience with either MacOS or Windows wouldn’t know where to start to fix such an issue either.Other than this it’s been fine.
I had to say this yesterday, and I guess the universe didnt like that.
My laptop shit the bed today morning. My work laptop, running Mint booted into a black screen, had to clean install to get the screen back on.
It broke again in the evening, but then I had TimeShift snapshots to recover with.
Need to figure out some way to either make it nimble enough to recover from the black boots quickly or fix them for good.