A coworker of mine asked me to help him install Linux, he hasn’t tried Linux before but he’s sick of Windows.
He is very much into gaming, so gaming support is the first priority. He is also a developer/tester so I suppose that he will also want to have access to dev tools, languages, and other packages like that for personal projects.
My first go-to when recommending to newbies is Mint because it’s simple, tried and tested, but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience. However it scares me that there’s no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks and brew, or even podman images. Will this be a problem as he uses the OS for general usage besides gaming in the long term, would it be better to just go with Mint and set that up for gaming instead?
Feel free to also recommend other distros, but keep in mind that while he is technical, he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
Bazzite has newer drivers, ditto for CachyOS Handheld Edition for another SteamOS clone.
If you are afraid of being limited by flatpak for bazzite, (or any other distro but arch), you can use this :
an Arch container using distrobox that can run in every distro.
This way, you’ll have access to the AUR and arch repos in general.
He should start with Mint, learn the system in general, and then move to Bazzite, CachyOS, Pika or Nobara, which are more game centric.
Fedora KDE.
Steam and Heroic work fantastic on it.
Has its own App Store for searching for stuff.
Looks similar-esque to Windows so getting around is less painful.
Bazzite is just Fedora KDE but immutable and optimized for gaming
Definitely support this recommendation. Having switched to this from windows a few months ago I can say that it is very stable (after I fixed secure boot issue) and very pleasant to use. Solid built-in apps. Tried GNOME first. Its design was good but just not for me.
Yeah i was going to recommend Kubuntu but the 24.04 LTS is a bit outdated although it’s very stable.
Fedora might be a better alternative.
Recommend the one you use yourself so you are able to help them in the best way possible.
This is usually a good idea, but I think Arch would be a bit too much for him
Still, any Debian derivative would be just as easy for me to help and also for him to find help online, so that’s the main reason I’d choose Mint over Bazzite
I’ve been using Pop!_OS for gaming for a couple years now and it’s been great. It’s Ubuntu-derived like Mint, and I haven’t had much difficulty troubleshooting it, since a lot of the stuff on Ubuntu/Mint forums will work for Pop.
This is the correct approach, OP. Bazzite is good, but its immutability is an aspect one needs to get used to and learn to work with. Since you’re not (and I’m not saying I am ;), rather stick to something you feel comfortable supporting, because you’ll be the one they’ll come running to if they have a problem.
I moved my gf to Kubuntu, all she knows is double click starts her games, open konsole - press up arrow - hit enter to start the G13 kb and every so often click that round icon with the blue dot for updates whenever she feels like it (or something stops working). Oh yeah, kernel level anti-cheat is a dead stop under linux, if he plays any of them, he needs windows so far as I know.
I put flatpak as the default instead of snap (10 seconds), she is now as comfortable as she was under windows, I have also not needed to support her much (except for the stuff I forgot to setup). and for the love of god make sure you show your friend “TimeShift” can’t say enough how great that app is, you can
break almost anythingtinker to your hearts content and recover in minutes
I built a new gaming computer a month ago. After a couple hours of research, I chose Nobara. It was by far the easiest experience I have ever had setting up an OS and everything has worked flawlessly so far. Even my wife who isn’t tech savvy at all has no issues using it. I cannot recommend it enough to new users who want an easy time gaming. I’ve been a linux user for almost twenty years, but I just wanted something easy that didn’t need tinkering and Nobara delivered.
Definitely not bazzaite, it has lots of unremovable bloatware and since it doesn’t have native package manager it will be a problem. For gaming i propose cachyos, it focuses a lot on performance in games. They have their own proton, kernel and they even had their own browser
has lots of unremovable bloatware
Such as?
No native package manager? How does Bazzite manage packages then?
Ideally, you don’t. You can layer packages with
rpm-ostree, but that’s typically something you want to do very intentionally and sparingly, not as a first resort for installing packages.Instead, everything is typically installed in userspace via Flatpak/AppImage or using the
distroboxcommand to create podman containers (where you can install software using its package manager, depending on what base distro you chose for it).When you update, you are replacing the current system image with a new one, so if there’s a problem with the new system, you can just
rpm-ostree rollbackto the previous one.Let me know if you have other questions. I run Bazzite on a laptop daily.
Thanks for the explanation.
I’m only vaguely aware of the concept of an atomic distribution, so there’s a lot to learn. I guess it’s about time I sacrificed my spare laptop to silverblue.When it comes to recommending a distribution to a newbie, I have mixed feelings about atomic distributions. If the newbie in question just wants to leave the OS alone and focus on gaming, Bazzite sounds like the best option.
On the other hand, if the newbie wants figure out how things work, starting with an atomic distribution doesn’t really sound like the easiest starting point. Is it though? Could be mistaken.
I think it’s pretty simple to understand if the system just pulls packages from the repos and downloads what needs to be updated. If you add flatpaks and appimages to the mix, it just adds another layer of confusion. Totally fine for your second distro though. After all, getting to experience new and interesting ways to do things is the joy of distrohopping.
And then there’s rpm-ostree thing. I really need to read more about that, but that sounds like yet another layer in an already very tall cake. Those newbies who want to know how these things work may find an atomic distro a bit overwhelming.
But do you really need to understand any of that to get started? Do you think it’s enough for most newbies to just install a few flatpaks to get the apps you need? Do you think they would need to involve rpm-ostree within the first year?
On the other hand, if the newbie wants figure out how things work, starting with an atomic distribution doesn’t really sound like the easiest starting point. Is it though? Could be mistaken.
This is where I would agree with you, except to clarify and say, “It depends.” There’s plenty to figure out, and there’s a lot you can learn about when it comes to understanding what layer(s) a piece of software runs in. A driven newbie could find it rewarding to figure out this new paradigm. I once read a post from someone who installed Aurora on a grandparent’s laptop, and the grandparent ran with it and learned how to use everything themselves. It’s good to know who the end user is.
It also highlights some of the pitfalls and old practices of relying upon
sudowithout good reason. Lots of software only needs to run in local userspace, for example, and devs should really take into consideration what permissions they actually need, rather than choosing what’s easiest and expedient.And then there’s rpm-ostree thing. I really need to read more about that, but that sounds like yet another layer in an already very tall cake.
It’s not so much another layer but dividing the existing cake into very distinct layers. You have an immutable system layer, you have an app layer for apps that you apply with
rpm-ostree, and you have the user layer where your Distroboxes and Flatpaks live.The benefit of this structure is that you can swap out the system layer at will. In theory, you could swap from a Gnome-based system to a Niri-based one, and rather than keeping all the Gnome apps and settings, you now just have the Niri ones. This ability to swap out the system layer makes it so system updates are much safer and less prone to conflicts, and they’re much more scalable for large deployments.
But do read more about it. There’s pros and cons to it, and then you can really get into the weeds with
bootc…Do I think a newbie needs to know this stuff from the get go? Probably not. I think that particularly since atomic distros have been around for several years now, the Flatpak ecosystem has grown quite a bit. There’s a lot already there that will work for most people. There’s a possibility they would need to layer something within their first year (I needed Java, for example), but it’s not likely they’d need it often if at all.
If they can’t help but tinker or theme, though, I would steer them away from atomic distros entirely. As interesting as they are, they’re geared towards duplicability, not bespoke modifications. My daily desktop driver is CachyOS, and I tinker with that, but the laptop with Bazzite is one I need to have maximum uptime.
Using something called rpm-ostree. rpm-ostree is a hybrid image/package system. It combines libostree and libdnf to provide atomic and safe upgrades with local RPM package layering. Still that isnt real package manager since you cannot remove or install anything from fedora repo, it is only used for updates and thats all
rpm-ostree, brew, and dev containers. I haven’t felt the lack, but it is likely not for everyone.
Also distrobox
Flatpacks
In order of ease of use; Nobara (Fedora based), popOS (Mint/Ubuntu based), cachyOS (Arch based, easy enough to use but might be overwhelming because of the amount of linux jargon going on) over bazzite, depending on your friend ability and wish to tinker around with his OS.
I have had problems even dragging dropping files across apps in bazzite and other immutable distros like bluefin. If your friend is interested in tinkering just a little bit then he will be be banging his head across a wall with bazzite. The community support for these relatively new immutable distros is also quite bad when it comes to edge cases.
I strongly disagree with the order. To me, nobara has broken more than any of these (quite frequently actually), pop os is clunky and not intuitive, cachy is surprisingly the most stable for me and easiest despite it being arch based. Bazzite I use on my home living room computer and it’s been pretty solid. I’m a little concerned with it though because I believe they are having some maintainer issues that might impact future releases.
At the end of the day, Nobara is pretty much a one-man hobby project. Sure, there is a small community around it nowadays but even then, if the main developer decides to drop it, they’d have hard time keeping up. That’s why I’m usually hesitant to recommend these types of distributions and I’d rather recommend something tried and tested with a big community build over many years.
I switched from win11 to nobara about 2 months ago and so far am really happy with it. Anything i should look out for that could avoid ‘breaking’ it?
Once I tried to install a different desktop environment and that didn’t go well. Another time it just… Stopped working? I hadn’t changed anything. It seemed like a Nvidia thing but I never did recover it. Ended up doing a fresh install. If you’re 2 months in you’ve done better than I did! It might just not like my machine
I’m running on AMD hardware, which might help. However, I thought Nobara offers a special edition for NVIDIA GPUs to ensure better compatibility. Also, from what I understand, there’s a lot of optimization under the hood in Nobara, and it’s recommended not to change the base packages. Maybe this does include the desktop environment as well…
Yeah I thought it would be great and bought into the hype. It ended up being one of the more frustrating distros for me. Maybe your right about the de being included in base packages? Regardless, it lost me after the second issue. On cachy now and happy. Plus I really like the little terminal update animation thing if pacman C eating the progress bar.
I would also be frustrated, if it did break twice. Happy to hear you found something that works. I also found CashyOs really interesting. What turned me away was the fact that it is based on arch and I read everywhere that arch is hard for newcomers to Linux. But maybe this does not apply to cachy. If nobara should break some day, i think this will be the next distro I will test.
I too was scared of the arch but it’s been as easy as any other distro so far
I’d say Bazzite but I would warn him (and since he’s a developer already it might not be a big deal) if he’s looking to do any sort of dev work or whatever with Bazzite then prepare to utilize stuff like distrobox, flatpaks, etc to accomplish stuff like that.
That being said as a dev and gamer myself if my first linux experience was Bazzite I might get annoyed. Mint is a great first experience. when I originally tried it well over a year ago though I did have issues with my Nvidia GPU on it and gaming wasn’t super great BUT it’s been awhile since I’ve used mint so that may have changed.
Honestly I would suggest start with Mint and just drive it for a couple weeks. If he likes it but feel it’s limited for some things then that’s when he can expand out to different distros. And like I said maybe gaming on Mint has improved since I last used it. But if he’s comfortable with running distrobox and containers then Bazzite is fine.
I’d say Bazzite but I would warn him (and since he’s a developer already it might not be a big deal) if he’s looking to do any sort of dev work or whatever with Bazzite then prepare to utilize stuff like distrobox, flatpaks, etc to accomplish stuff like that
That’s what I figured, I would be very annoyed to have to use images for software I would simply do an apt install for in other distros, so I’ll leave out Bazzite from my options definitely
Bazzite has a developer edition OS image
If he’s a dev, he might actually prefer it. Just explain and let him decide which one he wants to try first.
And then when he try actually tries it everything breaks and he spends hours trying to get udev working from a distrobox container.
Why would it break?
Sorry, I mean “it simply doesn’t work”.
You might just want to recommend fedora with the caveat that he’ll need to do a little setup with drivers. Bazzite and nobara are both fedora distros.
So, all downstreams have no added value?
That’s not what I said. My experience with nobara personally hasn’t been great and while I use bazzite at home for gaming PC but wouldn’t recommend it at this moment because it seems that the dev team is having some drama. I use cachy daily and find it wonderful and super easy. Not the arch difficulty that I was expecting. It’s a downstream.
Mint for the community support. He’ll have tons of resources if he runs into anything and you’re not available. As a dev he should be resourceful in that regard.
But definitely check the kinds of games he’s playing. Modern multiplayer games will be a big hurdle if they’re not steam verified.
People who want to play games with kernel level anti-cheat won’t be happy with Linux. If that’s a must, they’d need to look for other solutions. For all others, Mint is great to get started. Most people just want their computer to work with minimal hassle. That’s what Mint excels at.
I agree with this. I even went with LMDE instead of the main Mint and there have only been a few small things I had to really fiddle with to get working how I wanted.
Having so much documentation that is actually correct and useful is a godsend to a noob like me.
If he’s a dev, he probably is able to follow this guide:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guideThe result is a system, that has virtually every package you can imagine in the aur, always the newest packages - which is quite important for gaming performance and a really slim system.
For the gaming part I recommend Gamescope:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GamescopeAs desktop Plasma is a good choice for beginners. However I personally use Sway.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Plasma
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SwayI installed Arch for the very first time this past weekend. I am a software engineer with almost 30 years experience and some time less with Linux. I did my research beforehand: I watched a manual installation on YouTube and I went over the wiki.
And the manual installation was hard. I would not recommend it to a beginner.
he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
This isn’t Arch, sorry. My own Arch didn’t boot the first time (but yes I was able to fix it quickly).
I went with mint, had mininal troubles getting gaming setup and still a good none gaming experience. Show him how to customize his desktop a bit i really enjoyed trying cool themes to fit the gaming vibe.
I think Bazzite is the “easiest”. But I think it would be very difficult to tinker for someone not used to Linux. It’s the plug and play option. For me the fact that bazzite tries to be immutable is a very good plus for stability on the long run. And somehow fits well for gaming on Linux. The drawback is that these immutable distro are hard to tinker with if you dont have experience with immutable package managers and so on.
CachyOS has maybe a more traditional structure but should offer good performance too.
There is also Nobara and Pop OS.
I’m on PoPOS but it’s too recent for me to give feedback for gaming. But it should work well too.
he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
Of the two options you gave, I’d go with Mint. If your friend runs into a problem, it would probably be easier to diagnose the issue since it’s just Ubuntu/Debian under the hood.
Once they get used to it, they can try other gaming specific distros if they want to try to get a little more performance.
Always start with Bazzite. If you decide you want more control, switch to Fedora KDE. When you want to explore whats out there, put everything that interests you on a Ventoy thumbdrive. I don’t recommend Mint for new users.
