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.

  • iByteABit@lemmy.mlOP
    4·
    7 hours ago

    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

    • warmaster@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 hours ago

      If he’s a dev, he might actually prefer it. Just explain and let him decide which one he wants to try first.

    • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      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.

        • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          14 minutes ago

          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.