I’ve been toying with Linux on and off for almost 20 years now.

Started with damnsmalllinux on some ancient 600mhz Thinkpads. Dual booted Ubuntu for a long time, back when 3d desktop cubes were all the rage, so I’m used to gnome, synaptic and apt.

Tried to stick with it, but never could get away from Windows entirely. Especially for gaming, and a few critical apps. Eventually I kind of drifted away, and went full Windows for years. I always keep an Ubuntu LTS thumb drive around, and would use it occasionally for various reasons, testing etc etc.

Recently I installed Ubuntu 24.04, and had tons of stability issues. Mostly involving video output and the GUI. Screen would jitter left and right a few pixels. And sometimes maximized windows would be transparent to clicks, so you’d be clicking random stuff below the window. This was especially bad with Firefox and VLC, separately. I also had issues with removable drives not mounting properly. Standard stuff, I wasn’t doing anything weird. Practically a fresh install.

So I tried Mint, cinnamon. And so far I really like it! I’ve not been running it daily, but just the same tinkering. And so far no issues at all. But that got me thinking, what else am I missing?

I’m comfortable in the command line, but not proficient, I appreciate a good GUI for most things.

I plan to do some gaming, so steam proton compatibility is important. I don’t think that’s hard to achieve, but I wanted to make sure, it’s important to me.

Last time I played with KDE was a decade ago, I hear there’s lots of new developments going on there? In plasma? Unless plasma is different now, IDK I haven’t looked extremely hard.

I don’t care much about customization, I don’t want arch. I want something that is a pretty solid base, with decent features, and good support for when this go sideways. I feel like that’s not Ubuntu anymore. Especially with them pushing into Wayland and flat packs.

I guess my question is, does Mint seem like a good distro to start with? Or am I not looking hard enough?

Thanks!

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
    3·
    4 hours ago

    Mint is great as long as you don’t care about HDR or Wayland. Seeing as you don’t want Arch and Ubuntu is being a pain in the ass for you I’d say give Debian Testing a try. It has the newest packages unlike standard Debian. You can choose KDE, Cinnamon, or something else. I hear people constantly reccommending OpenSuse but I’ve never tried it so I can’t comment. If you just want to game and don’t care about much else then Bazzite is pretty great. Nobara is also popular. PopOS kind of sucks in my experience, I’d avoid it unless you know you’d like it.

    Edit: Forgot to clarify HDR support requires KDE Plasma or GNOME. Plasma has better support for it right now.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Thanks! HDR isn’t important to me right now. Though I think I need to specify that I’ll be installing this on a framework laptop, and therefore, from what I’ve learned recently, Wayland is actually preferred because it enables some track pad gestures that x11 lacks somehow.

      I’m definitely leaning towards bazzite, because people seem to think it’s not that bad even for general use, and it ticks a lot of boxes.

      Though nixOS is on the table. I at least wanna try my hand at configuring it.