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It’s been my default choice for years now, and I’ve recently switched to the Debian-based version. Couldn’t be happier.
I never used a spin-off of a unique distribution of GNU/Linux on my own computer, except the dark Ubuntu times. It seemed right at the time.
Now, I don’t see why I should recommend a distro that tries to be easier on new users when the original has sane defaults and is closer to upstream regarding all the tools and software bundled with it.
Here are my recommendations for new users in that order (regardless of their computer knowledge): Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, LFS. Friends can help with the installation and should consider easy maintainability when dealing with users who just want to use it.
My personal preferences are Gentoo and Debian.
I haven’t used Mint in years, but back in the day downstream distros from Debian often worked better for desktop users than Debian itself.
This is because of Debian’s ‘stability’ philosophy. This meant that bugs could stick around for years in Debian stable after being fixed upstream.
Of course, with each new stable release, there should be fewer bugs so this problem should become less over time.
I’ve considered switching from Manjaro to Debian on my laptop, but then I think about how great the AUR is. That’s pretty much the main appeal for Manjaro over Debian, for me.
Yea Gentoo is the go-to for new users. Are you from the last millenium?
Indeed, but what has this to do with my recommendation? ^^
It clearly depends on what the new wants to get in to. Gentoo is a smart way to learn a lot while installing it. I mean it; this is no joke!
Its common sense to learn new stuff going to most complex way. But enough sarcasm for today.
Before switching to LMDE, I did try just using Debian with Cinnamon, thinking it would be pretty much the same experience. I did not really enjoy the experience. There were too many niceties missing that I had taken for granted with Mint. I wasn’t interested in spending my time hunting down all the tweaks and packages to make those changes.
I switched with Bookworm. It’s great!
Lmao
I’ve been using Mint for a few months now after initially trying Fedora and Kubuntu. Mint has been by far my favorite experience and I’ve even gotten a few people converted to Linux via Mint. Definitely my recommendation for any Linux newbies.
I have used some distros by now and I do love mint. But a few years back every major upgrade of mint lead to bugs and me reinstalling my system. So far the only Distro i tried that just keeps working is MX Linux on my old laptop.
Because I want to get rid of windows I installed Nobara. I love to play games. I works pretty good, but since only one guy ist maintaining it, it should be not considered a daily driver.
I am still not happy because it dont want to switch between distros for gaming and working.
Because I want to get rid of windows I installed Nobara. I love to play games. I works pretty good, but since only one guy ist maintaining it, it should be not considered a daily driver.
Nobara is just a Fedora remix. I’ve used another remix a bunch of years ago and converting that to a regular Fedora installation after its maintainer left was just removing that addon repo and letting dnf handle the rest. I think I only needed to switch to Fedora’s branding packages.
Installs mint. Connects to wifi at work. Prompted with a window that wants me to specify certificate versions or whatever. No clue about what any of it means and never get to connect. Uninstalled and back to Windows. Mint so easy to use /s 👍
Mints wifi was a pain in the ass first time I used it, try some distro with kde as stock, or install it yourself. Might be more usable
Yeh and apparently Lemmy folks down votes legit bad experiences with gnu/Linux. If you think the user is the problem here, this community seriously have a problem if thet want gnu/Linux to be mainstream.
People here really do need to realize how little the average user is willing to tinker and troubleshoot. Not to mention the software availability. Saying “it’s soooo easy to switch over” is just blatantly false, even now. The vast, vast majority of gamers play games with incompatible anti-cheat. Those people will likely not stop playing the games they want to because of moral values or Foss whatever’s. Same with software. Sure, krita or gimp are easy as hell to pick up, but if you’ve lived your whole life with Photoshop, and have no problem other than the usual adobe bullshit, you’re not gonna switch to an is with zero possibility of supporting that app any time soon.
I can’t offer a solution to fix linux’s issues, but there needs to be a community willing to answer the most basic questions honestly.
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Second one, which I’d rephrase as ubuntu sticking with apt/dpkg as its package manager. Which is really nice if you like ubuntu as a distro already.
Though I don’t really get why there has to be a distro to be beaten. And having flavors is always good. I, for example, don’t like distros changing too much upstream SW, so the more vanilla the better. I don’t like either the periodic releases, and to be rolling release rocks. I don’t like systemd, whereas most distros now a days are systemd dependent. I also dislike network manager and similar and require a distro that keeps support for the basic dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant… All that to say, that no distro fits all needs, so several options are good, no need to have one beating the rest, :)
I think it’s just healthy competition
Artix GNU+Linux. In plan: Guix GNU+Linux.
I never ”got" why people like Mint so much. it is mid
Low bullshit quotient. No sudden garbage.
I switched when one guy unilaterally decided Ubuntu would completely flip its user interface, for no goddamn reason, the night before a long-term-support feature freeze.
I think mid translates to reliable and boring. Which is desirable for an OS.
Exactly. I want my OS to be as fucking boring as humanly possible.
Is it more or less boring than Fedora
It’s simple and solid enough to give to people who don’t know what they’re doing, and its Debian/Ubuntu base makes it flexible enough to not slow down power users who want to start modifying it. Other distros that might fit this bill keep shooting themselves in the foot and going off in weird directions, while Linux Mint has been a reputable no-BS distro for a very long time. It’s a workhorse distro without any gimmicks and that’s the point.
Mint was my “gateway distro” to get away from windows as a daily driver. It still is my daily driver and it’s given me enough guardrails to not screw it up too badly and learn.
I’m looking to go further up stream towards Debian. I’ve looked at arch and “arch that’s not allowed to be called arch because it has a gui installer”, but I’m not ready/able/“risk-tolerant-enough” to keep that stable as my daily driver. Fedora dormant seem quite right for me.
I really like mint, it meets my needs, has treated me well.
I’m curious to know what arch-based distro you’re talking about?
I looked at Manjaro VERY briefly, and I played with Endeavor a bit. I installed several distros as VMs just to poke around. I found Debian familiar which is likely the main reason I find myself leaning that way.
I use Mint, PopOS, or Arch/EndeavourOS more or less interchangeably. I’ve sincerely never had any issues with Arch’s stability. The term “stable” when describing a distro refers more to the package versions than system stability or overall reliability. Things aren’t necessarily broken cause they’re more up to date. Back in 2020, my laptop didn’t play well with Ubuntu 20.04 because of some power management issue caused by a kernel bug. My only real option was getting off of LTS and switching to 20.10 which had a newer fixed kernel version. So in effect, the Ubuntu LTS was less “stable” for me because of them keeping the kernel version stable.
YMMV, obviously, but most of what I’m doing when doing a fresh install is installing the packages I need, and configuring them. I can do this pretty much regardless of the distro. Most of the difference is if those packages are available in the first place, and how I’ll have to install them if they aren’t in the base repositories. Configs/dotfiles are usually pretty portable. The rest is just well… Linux as usual.
From experience, ignore your instincts and give pure Arch a try. It’s a lot more stable than you’d think, and their wiki has very thorough instructions for everything.
It’s a bit of a trial by fire on your terminal knowledge, but you’ll learn a ton in the process. Worst case, you get fed up trying and just go to Fedora or something after.
I’m sure it’d be fine, I’m probably not willing to put in the right amount of effort. I think a big fear for me is I use the computer for work, and while I have others, I prefer this one. I may not have the 15-30min to research and resolve something I did to myself.
I also try not to be the person who asks for help on the same question for the 17th time.
So far I’ve always been able to find answers in documentation or communities. Turns out I’m not so unique. ;).
I would echo that but suggest going to EndevourOS. EOS is a lot easier to install for normal people. What you get is insanely close to pure Arch.
I agree that running Arch is easier than people think. It is very stable. Also, because everything you could want is in the repositories ( and up-to-date ) it does not become a spaghetti like mess over time. No more third-party repos. No more PPAs.
i dont have the energy or patience to go to a wiki for my OS, i just want it to work and not be proprietary. besides setting up wine staging and pipewire it’s generally been smooth sailing
I’m with you here, sometimes I’m really lazy and don’t want to mess with it. Other times I’m hell-bent on doing something I know how to do in a GUI through terminal.
Mint has let me keep my system OS rock solid, and I’m not afraid to try about anything in the vm. Reinstall when time permits or just roll back to a snapshot.
I’ve got time shift installed, but I use my computer for work, so there’s some draw to stability and having everything just work.
You can go to the wiki, or you can search random forums and stack overflow like normal when things go sideways 🤷♂️
Why not lmde if you want something closer to Debian?
Thanks for this recommendation as it’s potentially a logical step. I’ve thought about this but not researched it enough, yet. I don’t understand enough about the differences yet. Hypothetically, do I need or want Mint on Debian, or do I just want to get the real deal? Not posing the question to you, just what I’ve yet to research further. Mint is currently working fine for me, so there’s no rush.
Going straight to Debian isn’t hard. LMDE might have newer packages, IDK. I used Debian 12 for a bit and still use it on my server. Mint offers a great stock experience but Debian has a hard to explain vanilla coolness if you will. I would also recommend considering OpenSUSE if you haven’t looked at it.
Mint is for people who just want stuff to work and not fiddle about too much. It does that very well. Anyone who simply wants an alternative to Windows that is easy to get into and use will be perfectly happy with it. If you want to customise everything to a t, Mint isn’t for you
Arch is bleeding edge and frequently has minor bugs as a result. This is probably fine for power users and people who want to learn Linux but I wouldn’t give an Arch distro to someone who isn’t techy. They also likely won’t appreciate the frequent updates to applications that they depend on to actually do work.
(I used Arch for almost five years and think it’s one of the best distros)
It’s reliable, customisable, everything is doable in a GUI, and has a Windows UX that people are familiar with.
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I could never get Pop OS working. The first apt upgrade would delete everything and I’d be unable to boot.
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Ah well. I’ve since become #debian4life
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I’ve been using Linux for a decade, and I think Mint is great!
It was my first distro I liked it at the time, but after they killed of the KDE Edition I tried out Manjaro and the rolling release with up to date software just fits my use case much better.
For a home user with recent hardware in my opinion the system to beat is openSUSE Tumbleweed. It is a stable and rolling distribution, that is, it has the best of both worlds.
I think most mainstream distros have reached a point of diminishing returns, and that’s a good thing.
I’ve used Linux for over two decades (red hat to Gentoo to Ubuntu to arch) and I must say it’ll be a tough sell to get me back to an RPM or a debian based distro solely due to how god awfully slow the package managers (dpkg and rpm) are.
Since Docker came along and brought with it the ride of Alpine and APK, it made me realize that system upgrades on a modern processor, fast internet, and an SSD should take seconds, not minutes.
I love how it’s focused on stabilty in UI/UX and that it’s supported by a lots of peoples around the world.
The only thing I dislike about Mint is that their forums uses that awful Sukuri(?) firewall that blocks VPN’s, and when people complain about it the forum users say that the firewall doesn’t block VPN.
I half expect if I ever needed to seek help in the forum to, say, ask for help with boot problems the reply would something like “You don’t have boot problems”.
But that’s not really a Linux Mint problem, so I guess there’s nothing I dislike about Mint.
