I’m installing a second disk in my desktop, and I’m going to install Linux.
I’ve had dual boot on all my machines since forever. As in decades. I’m an old hand. Perfectly happy in a terminal.
I have Mint in (on?) my laptop because lazy.
I’m asking about QOL. The only “Gaming” I do are flight Sims, and although I haven’t tried, I believe X-plane is Linux native. However, I do use some apps which are not Linux native, so I’d need some form of wine or performant VMs.
The PC is a Ryzen 9+64Gb, so it should handle a lot of things quite well.
I’ve been playing with both in VMs, but I can’t get a feel for what my virtualization and wine use would be.
BTW, I might do an install of both, maybe side to side, without commitment to either, and then decide. It’s going to be a blank slate install anyway.
From my trials, both seem comfortable enough.
I’ve heard good things about both.
Opinions?
Bazzite is imo the laziest and most hands free way to use Linux. If that’s your jam, use it.
Why not stay with Mint when you’re used to it?
Personally I love OpenSUSE and don’t like atomic distros. But my first instinct is to recommend the familiar. Mint should be able to do what you want as well as the other two.
I had a bad time getting Bazzite working and ended up switching to CachyOS, which I have been happy with.
That’s incredible.
Imo whatever problem you had is probably way easier to solve than managing an Arch derivative medium term… Anyway I wish you best of luck.
What didn’t work for you? I’m struggling to get UE5 working and thinking about trying something else, but everything else has been pretty great.
They both worked fine for me, but installing almost everything through yay on CachyOS instead of having to deal these on bazzite (link below) was a huge QoL change for me. That and the sheer amount of documentation for arch is just awesome.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/
To me, this was a mess and was convoluted. It helped me learn a ton, but if you want simple and need more than just gaming on steam, it’s not worth it imo.
I installed OpenSuSE Slowroll yesterday. I felt underwhelmed by their bad documentation. Their nvidia installation driver wiki was wrong, and resulted in the drivers not working (not all packages were pulled through via dependencies). I opened a bug report and they did a few changes to the wiki very fast (thanks to a nice suse engineer), but the overall wiki page remains utterly convoluted. And I’m mentioning this because even if you might not have to deal with nvidia, the rest of the system receives the same care. YaST is an eye sore with the worst UIX ever designed by man. And after installing the drivers and updating the system, now systemd takes 1.30 minutes to journald it – out of nowhere. It’s just a weird distro, with no attention to detail for end users, imho.
Regarding Bazzite, is a gaming distro. If you only play 1 kind of game that works with Mint, stay with Mint (or Debian-stable).
Wine will never work properly for apps. Sure, it manages to load a few apps, but they are crashy. Reimplementing the Windows API is a massive task that won’t finish for decades. So I suggest you use Linux-native apps instead. I moved from Photoshop to gimp3 too, even if I had the last non-subscription version on CD and it kinda worked with wine (but not really). Same with Affinity Photo, that many people suggest to run on wine, it’s super crashy on wine. So, avoid windows apps via wine. Games do work because they use very little of the windows api.
In other words, stay with what you know works without headaches (Mint), and move to native Linux apps, and Steam for games. I’ve been using Linux since 1998 and I’m comfortable with the terminal too, but I don’t enjoy having troubling installations. I’m at age now that I want things to just work.
I have seen your posts here for a few months and you are far more knowledgeable than I am in Linux. However, I have to say I disagree here. I did use Slowroll for two months and found no problem, nor a need for much wikis, if any… now, I dont have nvidia so maybe that is why. The main developer of Slowroll is awesome (personable and reachable) and his professionalism is what make him not categorize his Slowroll as stable so it is not listed as such. He has previously mentioned the challenges he is facing with the concept, but that can be addressed in due time. Most people in OpenSUSE should use either Tumbleweed or Leap for now.
Regarding OpenSUSE, it is a tad behind Fedora in refinement but minimal. Its biggest handicap, however, is its small footprint in the Linux marketplace, yet still amazing what they had pulled off with their limited resources.
Your beloved Mint, oh gosh, how much I tried to like it, but aesthetics and lack of flexibility kills it for me. It is, hands down, the less problem free one, no questions, it is what I recommend most for someone that need a set-it-and-forget-it distro, Mint is still the one. But I just cannot work happy with Cinnamon, even when first started in Linux. One system in the same ubuntu branch that I found almost as reliable as Mint, but with fairly new KDE, is TuxedoOS; more stable than Kubuntu, a bit less than Mint, and close in freshness as Fedora/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
I don’t know if you’ve read about atomic distros yet, so here’s a link to that. Personally I’d pick OpenSUSE over Bazzite because I don’t like the idea of updates possibly overwriting anything I install myself that isn’t flatpak/distrobox/homebrew, but that’s not a dealbreaker for many, it’s just a different way of installing software that ensures the operating system doesn’t get packages installed that can make it unstable.
I wouldn’t be too worried using OpenSUSE in particular as it has excellent snapper integration that makes it very easy to roll back any changes made to the system that might cause said instability or inability to even boot to desktop (especially with grub-btrfs set up).I’d pick OpenSUSE over Bazzite because I don’t like the idea of updates possibly overwriting anything I install myself that isn’t flatpak/distrobox/homebrew
In atomic distributions you would install non-sandboxed programs in a layer that is applied on top of the base system. When your system is updated, that layer is applied back on top of the updated system. The only possible breakage would be if what you installed depends on a dependency in the base system that has been removed or which is no longer compatible.
