Does anyone really recommend Ubuntu these days? I think Mint has reigned supreme for years, at least for beginners.
I recommended Mint to my partner and she wasn’t too enthusiastic about it after trying, I have Ubuntu on one of my laptops where she has a guest account and she actually prefers it even after hours of use so her new laptop is getting 24.04. I did do the diligence of explaining that Ubuntu is to Canonical as Firefox is to Mozilla, and why some Linux heads aren’t a fan.
Since bookworm, I find little need to push them past Debian. It’s clean and runs all the things.
I barely see people recommend mint anymore. It like every other Ubuntu family distro keeps having too many issues and poor gaming support compared to the steamOS styled distros.
Everyone is going to bazzite or cachyOS as the new “noob” distros cause they just work and play steam games and have steam deck isos.
It’s funny to see so many different echochambers at play. 🤭 No offense of course.
Mint is still by far the most popular distro, I even saw Goodwill selling computers with it now. Ubuntu is also widely used, apparently it’s really popular in India(?). Meanwhile in hackspaces NixOS and Arch are super popular. Personally I like OpenSuse, therefore hear a lot about that family of distros. We’re existing in a super diverse ecosystem.
It’s just annoying when people recommend stuff not because they think it’s the best pick for the person who’s asking, but because they like it best (I swear on my grave, I god damn saw people recommending NixOS for elders and Arch Linux for productivity environments that must be 100% stable). Therefore I made a meme about it.
How does mint have “poor gaming support”?
How does mint have “poor gaming support”?
- The last time they tried it was ages ago, or they followed some old instructions.
- They’re trying to play a game that has serious anticheat aspirations and doesn’t run well on linux
- They want to play roblox.
I want to install fooFlorp2!
check nixpackages:
"
environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.fooFlorp2 ];or nix-shell -p fooFlorp2 "
edit configuration.nix, add pkgs.fooFlorp2
install happens, won’t work, no mention about the binary
Web search
ohh you don’t install it with pkgs, there’s a systemd that has to be enabled, and some config wrapped around it.
But the documentation said…
The documentation doesn’t lie, but it often doesn’t give you the whole answer either.
I love nix, but installing anything interesting ends up with a lot of websearches.
On the upside, my home/work and travel pc’s are all just lockstep. anything I install on one just ends up on the others, and that’s something cool.
As a person who just barley figured out how to install Mint in some laptops most of that looks like a foreign language to me.
heh, that’s even the easy part, it has a whole language that comes with it too. Getting up and running on NixOS with home-manager and flakes makes Arch install look like Candy Crush.
But it has lots of super-powers once you learn it. Steep curve though, and it never gets fully better, to this day it’s a search or two when I install something I’ve never used before.
I’ve had some people here tell me about POP_OS as it’s the most friendly to NVIDIA hardware and also is configured for gaming.
What are your thoughts?
It being good for Nvidia hardware isn’t wrong, but it being the best or especially good for gaming isn’t exactly true. It mostly boils down to the proprietary Nvidia driver being preinstalled and a lot of media attention why Pop!_OS became so popular for gaming.
Other distros that are just as good or better for gaming with Nvidia are, for example:
- Bazzite (Immutable)
- Nobara
- TuxedoOS
The first two are really going the extra mile for patches and gaming support. Bazzite can be a little bit frustrating though given it requires some additional knowledge to work with immutable file systems if you ever need to edit system files. Otherwise you should have a solid experience on any of them.
See I actually have a dual boot with Nobara right now and it is not playing nice with my RTX 3070
I see a lot og talk here abotu wha tis best. I want to play my games and work on my papers. I have mint right now but is there a better choice fro a beginner?
If you’re already on Mint and it works for you it’s a great OS to work with, so no inherent reason to switch. However if you look for something more modern with the same Desktop Environment as Mint (Cinnamon) perhaps Fedora Cinnamon is something for you (doesn’t use apt though). The most modern features you’ll find on a distro with KDE (Cinnamon for example is behind with support for modern stuff like HDR).
You’ll get tons of recommendations when it comes to modern KDE distros. Personally given you said you’re a beginner I’d suggest giving TuxedoOS a shot, as they
- Got the Nvidia drivers preinstalled
- Are based on Ubuntu (Best compatibility)…
- …which is the same base as Linux Mint (so .deb still work)
- Got the App Store all set up optimally (some distros don’t)
- There’s a hardware supplier if you ever look for sth.
Some negatives:
- Comes with Tuxedo Software superfluous to you (removable of course)
Depending on your beliefs it might be a negative that it’s made by a company. However Tuxedo is based in Germany (therefore GDPR applies), they’ve people work full-time on it and a good track record for many years now. Also having the Nvidia driver pre-installed is really good in my experience, only very few distros do that due to license stuff. Otherwise of course there’s also Kubuntu or Fedora for something with KDE. You can test all of them on DistroSea in your browser.
Feel free to ask anything. 🙂
Kinda new to Linux, is that the documentation icon ?
That’s Ubuntu, Mint and NixOS.
Thanks, I had recognized the first two but had no notion of the third
Debian/ubuntu/arch is easy to use even as a beginner, just try NixOS and compare.
Tap for spoiler
@[email protected] I think they found you
I’m in everybody’s walls… whispering the words “NixOS…”
No don’t use Nix they’re evil. Use Lix or Auxolotl or Tvix or Tangram or Brioche or Guix
Why is Nix evil? This is the first I heard
There was some politically charged drama… I think. There was some drama, anyway. I’m not clear on the details.
It was probably a Twitter-tier disagreement that was blown way out of proportion by a small group of people. If others have details, please don’t enlighten me, I value my ignorance.
NixOS accepted a military company and Pentagon contractor as sponsor and only dropped it after backlash. Ever since then the trust in Nix governance is damaged, even with them trying to regain trust.
(There also are other problems it appears like a distro maintainer pushing new & superfluous core tools without any discussion about it, but this seems to be the biggest one)
Overall linux is insecure and trash. Everyone should use temple os. Its the only os whose creator made an os to evade cia, thus making it secure.
Imo a just works, deb based kde distro with nvidia drivers, flatpaks and no snaps is what we need to bring forth the year of the linux desktop.
Fedora KDE is not deb based, but dnf is better than apt anyway fight me
I don’t disagree but I still wanna fight, where do you wanna meet?
And one that you can get pre-installed on devices you can purchase. The “just buy and be happy” aspect is important for a lot of people as well, not to mention the valuable customer support. People with dispensable income who wish for this are usually furthest away from hackerspace culture though, so a lot of Linux enthusiasts seemingly overlook it. Or, when it comes to far-left people around, want to overlook it.
If I remember correctly TuxedoOS checks all those boxes. And I think if you want “same but Gnome” that would be SlimbookOS. 🤔
I dunno, we live in the age of ChatGPT. Between my generic but sufficient computer skills and ChatGPT’s hallucinatory ramblings, I’ve been smooth sailing on EndeavourOS for a few weeks now.
The EndeavourOS forums are also a really good help source if you wanna ditch the LLM, users there are pretty friendly and it’s probably where it sources most of it’s relevant info anyway.
Noted, thank you!
That’s where I went. Happy with my choice. Almost 2 years now.
Or arch instead of NixOS 😂
My gaming PC has been running EndeavourOS for about a year now. First ever time running any spin of arch and it’s been a stellar expirience. You can pry this desktop from my cold dead hands, I love it.
If you get bored later on try CachyOS. An update borked my eOS install and somehow screwed up my snapshots. So rather than deal with it, I tried out Cachy (Arch base) and just never went back. It has some quirks, but I haven’t had any issues for the past 6 months. And it’s fast.
I know that there is arch based distros that are more user friendly but I was talking about clean arch and not about arch based distros.
Oh yeah sorry I didn’t mean for it to sound like I was contradicting you, I just love my EndeavourOS install so much I couldn’t help but chirp up! I would not recommend any arch to a new user, including EndeavourOS.
It’s fine. I just said it because I thought there was a misunderstanding.
When my win 10 gaming box EOLs this fall, I’m probably going to jump it straight to arch, since it looks like the most straightforward way to build a Steam OS like system.
good luck.
If you want a steam OS just use cachy they literally have a steam deck img that is just steam OS minus the immutable bits for all realistic purposes.
Was going to be skeptical about an obscure distro, but I see they are currently #2 on Distrowatch. Can’t believe I’ve never heard of it before.
Appreciate the recommendation, I’ll def look into it!
I’ve genuinely never seen a single person recommend NixOS to a new user, unless they already had advanced technical knowledge
Are you new around here?
You could just look at my profile to see that I’m not. I’m also not new to Linux communities in general. Doesn’t change that I’ve never seen someone recommend NixOS to a complete beginner. I have (rarely) seen Arch recommended, but those recommendations will generally be downvoted and have many replies disagreeing. Linux Mint is by far the distro I see most often recommended, followed by Fedora.
What I see recommended nowadays is indeed mint, various Ubuntu variations, arch (always, although a lot of the time in jest), Nix fairly regularly, and as for the classics: SuSE and Fedora, they’re rarely mentioned.
As an experienced Fedora User, I recommend mint to newbies. Fedora having to add RPMFusion and figure out how to properly install the correct Nvidia driver can be daunting for a new user who is used to downloading exes. I love fedora though, and if it were not for that one thing I would be recommending it.
NixOS consist of a bunch of options that you define using the nix programming language. Since it’s a programming language, everything is well defined and organised into single place.
Technically, someone could build a GUI configuration editor with sane defaults and clearly organised pages of settings, which generates a configuration for you. This could immediately change NixOS from the most tedious to a relatively easy to use distro.
They already built a GUI editor, but a programmer made it so it is actually harder to use than the text file
Lmao which is it?
Nixos conf editor, it shows less of the config on screen than a text editor
And windows users are well known for their mastery of esoteric programming languages. Such as… um… ah… batch files, which, well, some of them can write. If they’re not more than four or five lines.
But that counts, right?Linux users can’t regedit. Regedit uses some weird programming language only known to a few windows grand masters.
It basically represents values with 16 possible symbols, ranging from 0 to f. We call it sixteendecimal. Very advanced. But nobody knows what they mean yet.
This should give you linux users a pause the next time you belittle windows users for their lack of computer knowledge!
Batch files¹, powershell, visual basic if you use Office, Lisp if you used AutoCAD back when macros were written in Lisp… 🤷♂️
¹- And, frankly, I doubt setting up NixOS is particularly more complex than setting up an autoexec.bat boot menu back when some programs (well, games are programs) wanted extended memory and some others wanted expanded memory (couldn’t have both modes at the same time, of course), and you had to make sure the drivers loaded in the most optimal order (which could vary depending on the aforementioned memory expanders, and which drivers the specific game actually needed) to fit as many as possible of them and DOS in high memory leaving as much as possible of the 640KB of system RAM free for the program… and I’m not even getting into the whole IRQ thing for soundcards and whatnot… and we had to do it all without Internet, learning by trial and error, or word of mouth, or from magazines…
Throw Mint Cinnamon or the latest version on the computer, solved. Ubuntu can… be speshy sometimes on my older spare laptop, but it is not really their fault, more my computer is a bit cooked. Some puppy linux distros are cool, but also a tiny bit complicated for beginners.
That was the reason I decided to install Mint Cinnamon.
It’s been impossible to install for a week now. And I’m not even 100% IT illiterate. After ~3 days of struggling, I decided to do the walk of shame and post on the Mint forum, admitting my failure. It’s been unsolved for about a week now. >100 fails and errors, crashes, freezes.
I can’t even imagine where I would (not) be had I chosen Kali or Arch.
Tbh you might have failing RAM or something. Have you run Memtest?
Yes, I have done a few things already, including memtest. I’ll copy from the forum:
The things I have tried:
- Updating my BIOS.
- The ISO I downloaded has been md5 checked, all fine. I have also tried 2 other ISO files from 2 other mirrors - same.
- Three (3) USB drives to install Mint, ranging from 8 GB to 24GB.
- Installing with or without multimedia codecs.
- Turning on secure boot before install (I was desperate, found a forum post with a similar error message, later I found out that it was for a different reason).
- Turning off secure boot before install (I found a different forum post where the exact opposite was recommended - later I found out that it was for a different reason).
- Installing in compatibility mode.
- Offering a sacrifice to Xebeth’Qlu, tormentor of souls.
- Running gparted before install, deleting the previously half-installed partition, formatting it myself to ext4, then running the installer.
- Splitting the aforementioned partition into a 16GB swap partition (I have 16GB RAM) and leaving the rest of it as ext4 (mounted at “/”).
- Running chkdsk -f on the SSD containing the MBR+Win10, then rebooting the PC twice, according to one of the error messages in my post below (then trying to install again).
Might sound like a dumb Q but have you tried testing any of the live environments or are you jumping straight to the install, and if you have played in the env. for a bit, have you tried installing any other distro? (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc)
I mean isn’t it accepted that NixOS is a terrible pick for a beginner, especially a non-technical one? I feel like even the Nix community doesn’t recommend the distro to complete beginners.
I use Nixos BTW.
And I can’t recommend it to anyone. Not even veterans.
I can only say if you like souls like games nixos might be your thing…
Lol I’ve been considering trying it and that might push me per the edge. The self hate is strong xD
If you do, this website is very helpful: https://search.nixos.org/options
Doubt, highly doubt it.
I use nixos btw
Complete with home manager, flakes, build server and automated deployments, the whole lot on machines from compute stick, gaming rig, hell even a surface. I have never had more free time than compared to arch. updates & config drift are no longer anything I worry about. Save so much time on rebuilds & customisations.
Nixos users never recommend it for new users. I always recommend mint or Ubuntu depending on the person and what they are used to. Seasoned Linux users i don’t even recommend it unless they have basic programming skills.
After that, bring it on, stick through the learning curve, you dont need the documentation. I only needed it at the start for a short period until it clicked and I figured it out. the repo and search has more than enough. In the repo you will find community builds and configs for a wide variety of hardware.
Seasoned Linux users i don’t even recommend it unless they have basic programming skills.
I’ve been using Linux about a decade and a half, and programming for almost twice that. I really just don’t like the Nix language (or DSLs altogether). I also had a poor experience with my first test of NixOS, by the docs, having not configured my networking stack, in making it impossible to fix without booting back to the live USB.
For people that do like the syntax and don’t mind DSLs, it’s pretty great and it’s excellent that the ideas have been propagating elsewhere. I love the concepts but not the implementation.
I’m not advanced, just a distrohopper for fun :-) but NixOs seemed excellent, you install like an other os, open the config file and write a list of what you want installed, rebuild and it’s all there. Then use it just like any other distro. That seems a good experience to me and if you are just a simple desktop user like me what else would you ever need to do? Am I right that all the homemanager and flakes business is optional and for people with more complicated requirements?
I really wish everyone thought like that, but I still see people recommending Nix, Arch, Void… and some go the ideological route and start recommending systemd-less only like Artix or ranting against anything that uses Flatpak. Those discussions can get messy, and they always alienate the person who asked. Unfortunately those with ideological reasons are always the loudest and present in basically every “Beginner’s Help” group.
I wouldn’t recommend vanilla Arch only because of the installation process. CachyOS that simplifies it is an extremely good pick for a person who already knows what a computer is, but wants to try a proper OS.
Arch mostly got it’s reputation in the early days. Today some things are a lot easier to do on Arch than on other distros, especially because AUR exists. Also, it built one of the best wikis over all that time.
Of the last 20 or so people iv helped swap over to Linux in the last year. They have all ended up just going straight to either endeavour or cachy.
The Ubuntu family distro like mint or pop always have some kinda of weird hardware problem with something. Everytime with out fail. Seriously I love the Ubuntu descendants like pop and mint. When they work, they just fucking work and are rock solid. But their it just works scope is just too damn narrow compared to arch for the freaks I know.
It’s amazing how much weird ass hardware people use that with out something as large as the aur, you just aren’t finding a reasonable solution. Fixes exist but ones that a total idiot can just install are rare. And fedora isnt much better in that regard.
Fedora also just has… Problems ane a community that makes it hard to tell new users to Google solutions
That or the “app stores” confuse the new users or cause problems inside of two weeks. Im always baffled Everytime I get a call and someone has managed to break their computer via a GUI package manager or app store.
Cachy just has everything games want pre installed and even the most nontechie gamers iv known basically hit the ground running with it. I think part of that is because it works for the exact use case a gamer would want basically out of the box with as little fiddling as needed and arch is bleeding edge enough to actually run new games reliably enough people don’t fuck with shit and break it trying to make things work.
For the rest endeavour has had the best rate at actually keeping people from just going back to windows.
Seriously wild how good endeavours conversion rate is.
Weird way to spell EndeavorOS
The devs of the OS spell it Endeavour. It’s one of those words that’s spelled slightly different in various parts of the English-speaking sphere. As it functions as a name here, I have no problem spelling it their way when referring to the OS.
EndeavorOS? Yay!
For most people though yeah, Debian is rock solid, only went arch on my desktop for nvidia drivers (and HDR), archinstall really simplifies installing it.
Arch and Debian wikis are both amazing sources of information, highly recommend for any distro.
I wish. People recommend Arch to beginners all the time. And then wonder why there’s so many “Linux is too hard” comments everywhere
Arch isn’t necessarily hard. It just is unstable plus it encourages dated ways of doing things.
It’s not hard if you’re into doing Linuxy stuff. A lot of new users are not, or find diving in too fast intimidating. Like it or not Arch is definitely in the deep end of the Linux pool.
Those make it hard
And it just seems towering overall with the insane egos of some Arch users on forums. It’s a good distro, just setting it up feels so tiring.
I feel like setting it up is easy (archinstall), maintaining it is the tiring part.
Its weird because Gentoo is actually more involved but the community seems to have none of the ego issues.
They had the same problem when it was relatively more popular.
