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I feel like I’m missing out on the mint hype train tbh. I’ve never tried it before but there’s an ignorant part of me that’s like “how much better could it possibly be than Ubuntu with Cinnamon?”. I know it must be because so many people default to it and rave about it, even after using Ubuntu.
My default ol reliable used to be Solus Linux. God I loved that distro. I had an install that lasted 4 years straight, no issues whatsoever.
But in recent years I’ve taken a major liking to Bazzite. Oh my god it’s incredible: immutable OSs are fucking amazing. I shouldn’t be trusted with accessing system files, it never ends well. So this really helps.
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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 or aurora if you don’t like gaming 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, lxqt 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 mean, depends on your style. I’ve been running endeavouros (Arch spin) on my desktop for two years now and it’s finally felt like home. Though I did my first mint install in maybe 5 years just last week on my media player box in the living room (Cinnamon version) and I’ve gotta say, it really does feel like “Ubuntu, absent all the bloat”. Runs really great on a 15-year old dell optiplex with almost zero bullshit beyond having to install vlc-plugin-base.
First, that sounded so “I use arch btw”, love that.
Second, I managed to get mint running on a 04-05 model dell. I was so shocked I was able to get it to boot. It didn’t run too well, but it was amazing!
I’ve been recommended it as a windows replacement on my new MSI gaming laptop. I’m thinking about that or Zorin.
I run Lubuntunon some old laptops I have for the kids, but I’m interested in seeing how well Zoron handles hardware.
Really, I need to slap some boot usbs in it and try it out…
I don’t know how long I’ve used Debian at this point.
After testing LM with Cinnamon, and a ubuntu based distribution with KDE… KDE is just better.
What are some things you preferred in KDE over Cinnamon? I haven’t explored KDE much.
Is it KDE Neon? I’ve been curious if it’s any good, haven’t tried. It’s just Ubuntu LTS with Plasma.
Desktop? Debian with GNOME. Laptop? Debian with GNOME. Tablet? Debian with GNOME. Server? Believe it or not, Debian without GNOME.
Debian is my favorite as well. I prefer KDE, though, because it is pretty. I also don’t get the GNOME hate, I just don’t love it as much and at this point KDE is way more familiar.
:s/GNOME/KDE/gOne small change and we could be twins. My Debian server also runs Proxmox though, that’s where I distrohop. In VMs.
Okay, I’ll bite:
Why GNOME? I personally find it very limiting, especially when attempting a Vanilla GNOME config.
A lot of people seem to feel like this. It’s obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.
And it’s always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.
I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don’t tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.
I started with Debian and XFCE and I still use Debian and XFCE lol
EndeavourOS is all i need and will ever need.
It’s so fucking perfect. Hadn’t felt so wowed by a slick put-together complete operating system since I first started using Mac OS X as a teen in like 1999. It’s literally more usable than every commercial OS on the market.
I’m still waiting for a useable screen reader :(
My first choice. Currently my only!
Solid first choice!
For me it’s been Arch for the last several years. It’s the only distro that can deal with the weird things I do while still working well for daily use.
can you explain a few of those weird things?
I like to edit configs, which can break apt, and build projects from source, which requires bleeding-edge versions of many libraries that most distros don’t ship with, which also tends to break apt when I manually install them.
Arch’s pacman gracefully handled modified configs and the Arch repos ship very new packages, so I don’t find myself fighting the OS.
I play with distro’s on task specific PC’s but with my main rig I stick with my distro.
Why bother with distro hopping when you can desktop hop?
Some reasons
- Package availability
- Preconfiguration curiosity
- Features (e.g. USE flags, different inits, musl, package manager speed, newness vs stability, different core utils, etc)
- Reliability
- Education
- Community
But yeah… It’s a mite silly to be distro-hopping just to try different desktop environments.
Methinks several still-new users are yet to realise the desktop environment and distro are not tied together, and nearly all distros offer nearly all desktop environments to install, just one command away.
It gets even more fun when exploring all the window managers, not just the few desktop environments. And… there be ways to ease that exploration even further.
I hopped from Debian to Manjaro and kept KDE Plasma. Main reason: Debian is stable, but I had to wait too long for some updates.
Went back to Mint a few times but ultimately I like Plasma over Cinnamon, so Debian it is!
You do know that you don’t have to change distros to change DE right?
I absolutely loved the release of LMDE, it’s just what I like though, the simple intuitive interface of Mint, without dealing with Canonical’s bullshit (really sour about snaps, ignore me lol).
Edit: picked back up my phone and reread what was on the screen when I realized you probably meant desktop environment and not Debian Edition when you typed DE.
Yep. I was using Plasma on Mint for a while but the consensus was you’re best off using a DE officially supported by the distro.
Never encountered any issues personally up to that point, but seemed to be the majority opinion when I researched it.
But my most recent switch was from Endeavour, so made much more sense to install Debian 13 than to Install Mint and then immediately switch DE.
