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 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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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
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/SwayDefinitely 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
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.
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.
Flatpacks
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can recommend nobara. Has all the game focused stuff bazzite has but it’s just regular old fedora with the dnf package manager underneath.
Nobara does seem pretty cool
I’ve tried many distros, Bazitte is by far the best for gaming without having to tinker. Fedora is not a good option imo because nvidia drivers are a pain in the ass.
I’d recommend he dual boot. Bazitte strictly for gaming due to it’s lack of traditional package management. And arch, Debian, or Fedora for coding.
I personally use PopOS for work stuff as well.
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).
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.
I use CachyOS for over a year. Mainly for playing.
