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.
I haven’t had too much issues with Bazzite for general use. I still use windows for work, so there’s some things I haven’t tried setting up and have no clue how different they’d be on an immutable vs a mutable OS.
I’ve used Mint before (like 10 years ago) and somehow it kept breaking (I’m sure I somehow caused it, but I only knew enough to break things and not enough to understand how I was breaking them). 🤷♀️ For most people, I’d think how Bazzite works would be acceptable. For some power users, the immutable OS aspect might be annoying, but I think that’s mostly an issue for people who are coming from a different Linux distro (it did bother me at first and I did consider switching to something like PopOS) or people who want to run fairly dated or obscure software (granted, VMs are sometimes already necessary for that - at a previous job, we had to use windows 95 VMs to run a specific version of software).