Hello guys i have a qustion about which distro i should use?
I want to dual boot windows and linux
I just want a safe place away from microsoft eyes to do edit and drawing and other hobbies on my pc. And playing some games like cs2 & 2d games Also the distro run my wallpaper engine Should be popular distro so if i have a problem i can ask about it
Please dont tell me linux mint because i tried it 3 times and everytime i do anything simple the distro goes off and i should re install i won’t give it anymore chances thank you 😖
Edit: thank you guys for typing your suggests. after some search i will give bazzite try and if won’t work like i want. I will go with the other suggests I really enjoyed reading all your suggests
Based on your last paragraph, you might fall in the supernoob catergory. You’ll want an immutable distribution, you can’t break those Unless you tell it to let you break it.
As a windows user, you’ll find familiarity in Fedora Kionite.
If you prefer a touchscreen oriented experience consider Fedora Silverblue.
There’s a few other options on the page I’m linking, I haven’t tried and therefore can’t recommend either of the others.
https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
Edit: my formatting was 🗑️
Edit 2, electric boogaloo:
OP in your post you state you want Wallpaper Engine to work, unfortunately, you’ll have issues there. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with wallpaper engine you may be able to do the same using KDE Plasma. I personally use a VLC command line call to enable animated wallpapers on my rig, there’s not exactly a standard for it on Linux so many of the solutions you find will be clunky. Just remember if you go around messing with your xorg.conf file you need to have a backup of it so you can undo changes easily in a terminal.
You’re welcome to DM me if you need assistance.
I was under the impression that the fedora atomic distros are hard to dual boot on a single drive.
Historically yes, but this appears to not exactly be the case any longer.
Reference https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/284
There does appear to be a way to do it, from a cursory glance at the above it seems that Fedora and Windows need to have separate EFI partitions, I’m not all that invested though (I don’t use these distros nor do I dual boot) so I don’t really care to look much deeper.
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Buddy I’ve got my pronouns in my username please don’t misgender me.
Additionally, your response is needlessly hostile. You’ve offered no additional information and have chosen my comment to be a naysayer on presumably only because it is the top comment on the post. You’ve contributed nothing but vitriol to this thread.
I couldn’t give two shits what distros people use, and I’m not a fucking shill. OP wanted a suggestion, I gave 4. I used tobhse Fedora because it’s easy, with a large community, and with the bleeding edge release cycle the newest libraries became available more easily without enabling testing repositories or using sketchy PPAs that haven’t been vetted.
If OP weren’t noob, and weren’t someone who has already broken a mint install three times I’d have recommended that use something Debian based or Arch based, but they are, so I didn’t.
Yeah, those people who use and recommend it are just in the pocket of Big Fedora!
I think immutable is great for everyone, I struggle to find a point against it but maybe I’m a supernoob too hahaha (I use NixOS, btw)
Relevant post I made:
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 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.
Thank you i will search about bazzite and see what i can do
If you don’t like the gaming stuff try aurora, feel free to message me on matrix.
Okay good, you also included Aurora. I agree almost completely with your previous post that mint is outdated, and an immutable is much better for someone who has no idea what they’re doing. No reason to blanket recommend Bazzite, hence the aurora comment.
I’m on Bluefin though, so that’s where we disagree 😏 Don’t know what it is but I’ve never liked KDE.
If your computer can’t handle Linux Mint, then either you do something wrong, or your computer is really unstable. I won’t ask you to use Mint, but I will say, that I use it on three different computers, and not a single problem anywhere. Dual-boot is notoriously unstable - mostly due to MS… So my advice is, to use a computer for Linux by it self…
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I suggest you to check out Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. I have been using it for years without any problems. I also have dual boot with Windows, but I think I will delete Windows soon and use only Linux.
My name is none of your business, and I approve this suggestion.
For most of us using Linux distros for years, we already have a preferred distro that is highly unlikely to be Ubuntu or even Debian based, but for first-timers, I honestly believe Mint is the way to go. But seeing how mint has been a flop for you (as another poster said, it’d be great to know what went wrong) an immutable distro (like Bazzite) would fit your current needs better, but these distros are not the best way to start learning about Linux and eventually migrate from Windows entirely.
Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
You say not to suggest mint, but you most probably used an Ubuntu based Mint so that doesn’t count.
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Honestly, Linux Mint is probably the best option. Failing that, Fedora is another good option which is derived from Red Hat, it does things differently to Debian based systems like Mint and Ubuntu, but it’s widely supported.
You’ll need to iterate what you were doing when it stopped working, 99% of the time, it’s down to human error. As someone once said:
“Unix [or Linux] will give you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. If you didn’t think rope would do that, you should have read the man page.”
I suggest BazziteOS. I have it installed on 2 of my computers for about a year and it works great. It runs KDE and it looks similar to Windows but is much better. Also, I believe it has support for Wallpaper Engine, though I haven’t tried it.
It is Fedora based and Fedora also has a sizeable community for any questions and tutorials you may have.
The reason why I recommend Bazziteos is because it comes out of the box ready for gaming, you would have steam, wine, lutris, etc installed almost instantly and ready to play.
I just finished downloading bazzite and now creating a backup on flash for both bazzite and windows using ventoy because i know myself i will do something stupid to make me re install systems
Chances are that, if you do break something, it’ll be on the Windows side.
Bazzite is very solid for new users as it’s very convoluted to access and modify anything system related.
Having said that, if you have any intention to learn how to use Linux distros, and eventually remove Microsoft from your life, immutable distros like Bazzite will limit you dramatically, so I suggest you start with a regular “mutable” distro. Now, if your intention is just to have something that works, scape Windows every now and then, and come back to Windows, it’s hard to beat an immutable distro.
I’m pretty sure you can also advance with Bazzite. I haven’t done anything too advanced, but I can imagine one can learn a lot simply by learning the ujust commands as they would apt.
Absolutely. Maybe I’m a bit biased. I can’t stick to anything immutable (other than my Steam Deck, and believe me, I’ve tried many times), and always come back to distros I can have absolute control over.
However, I have all my employees running Silverblue (mostly because none of them even know what CLI means 🤣).
EndeavourOS is the best imo because it’s basically arch with a minimal skin on it to aide in installation etc
I’ve been using it for the better part of 5 years now with no issues. I play games, self host, work etc It’s great.
If you install paru you get access to the AUR which has everything under the sun ready to install.
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Keep to popular distros. I’d personally recommend Pop os or fedora. Opensuse is up there too just never clicked with me when I was a new users.
I actually have started to discourage people using Ubuntu because of forced snap packages and multiple software store GUIs. It has led to a lot more confusion for new users even though Ubuntu is supposed to be user friendly.
Agreed. It was good for that for a long while, but there are much better options for newbies nowadays.
Exactly
Mint is a good transition from windows
Tried it and hate it
Yeah, honestly I don’t get all the love for mint whenever this question comes up. Bazzite’s a good choice, I’m running Bluefin it’s sister (same thing but not geared toward gamers) and it’s been great from a set it and forget it perspective. One caution is that they don’t always play nice with dual booting, so make sure you do your due diligence backing up what’s important to you.
I am doing backup right now and for the important files i just put it on my hhd and everytime i do something in systems and boot manger i just plug off the hard to make sure nothing gone
Maybe try Tuxedo?
Something listed in the top 10 or so on https://distrowatch.com/. Personally I like one of the Debian based distros.
Currently we use Ubuntu and Debian. Ubuntu would be the better of the two for beginners.
The distrowatch beginners list is: https://distrowatch.com/search-mobile.php?category=Beginners#simple
Why would Ubuntu be better for beginners?
Because Canonical put a lot of effort into usability. Pretty much all of the popular recommended beginner distributions are Ubuntu based. Examples: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, Elementary.
People will recommend other stuff, often that are loved by varioius enthusiasts but these may or may not be that suitable for beginners. Call me skeptical.
I use and recommend Ubuntu because it is easy to install, use, and just works. It is also widely supported and very popular. The one thing I do not like about it is the Snap focus. I would love to recommend Linux Mint but last time I used it major distribution upgrades from the GUI were not supported. Have no idea if they fixed that. Ubuntu upgrades are the click of a button. In my family there are nontechnical users and they have used it for almost 20 years just fine without much help from me.
On the other hand I use Debian if I intend to custom configure something and want a minimal install to start from. Major upgrades on Debian are not a click of a button. On the other hand Debian is not Snap based. My workstation and VPS are Debian for example.
How exactly does canonical make their distribution more usable than Debian?
On the other hand I use Debian if I intend to custom configure something and want minimal a install to start from.
Why?
Major upgrades on Debian are not a click of a button.
They’re the exact same as in Ubuntu…
On the other hand Debian is not Snap based.
Which is a benefit to new users. They shouldn’t be conditioned to be using snaps, anyways.
More usable. Better installer, better desktop configs, better eye candy, better upgrade tools, wider 3rd party support.
Upgrades. To do a major upgrade on Debian you go into the command line. You first adjust the appropriate files in /etc/apt. Then you run a bunch of apt commands.
Ubuntu you are asked if you want to upgrade to a new release and just say yes.
99% of the time a dual boot doesn’t work its because of Windows. There should be no real reason that Mint fails anything simple as long as its compatible with your system. I’ve seen others report that Windows will occasionally destroy a dual boot when updating.
