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.

  • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    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

    • HumbleExaggeration@feddit.org
      2·
      3 hours ago

      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…

      • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        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.

        • HumbleExaggeration@feddit.org
          1·
          2 hours ago

          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.