Axman
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Mint and Pop seem to be stuck in time.
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Ranking of Linux Distrubitions from Best to Evil
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Mint and Pop seem to be stuck in time.
Honestly, they're total shite. But for some inexplicable reason people keep recommending PopOS and Mint to transitioning users - I just don't get it.
Axman
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Oh that's easy, really good hardware support. I know other distros have that now, but Mint was the distro that made that happen in the first place. They have a hands off rep that none of the others have been able to market the same way. Even Ubuntu.
Vanilla Ubuntu isn't much better than Mint these days, some very odd implementations there...
But the beauty of open source is you have choice, if distro 'A' is bollocks, there's plenty more in the pool to choose from.
auntjemima
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I found Mint to have a nice layout and didn't look dated to me. I didn't know the rest of that stuff, but I was surprised that I had no issues in the past and then did on this instal, same hardware.
Axman
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Yeah, that's the thing that propelled Mint into it's own level of orbit, it looks fine and it installs, frankly, easier than Windows.
There's distro's that are miles ahead of Mint, Mint is rubbish. Sorry, but there's no other way to put it. People want honesty, that's honesty.
Most pre-packaged distro's install as easily as Windows now. I'd actually go as far as to state they install easier due to no forced TPM requirements, no underhanded manipulation pushing unsuspecting users to use Microsoft accounts, no asking if you want to use XBox Game Bar or Cortana. The only thing people struggle with is GPU drivers. Running Nvidia you can just add the launchpad PPA under an LTS release and install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, and there are plenty of well laid out simple to follow instructionals informing you how to do so; if you run AMD you're best to use the AMD-GPU/Mesa drivers, in which case I recommend a more rolling release distro - Although LTS releases can run with newer kernels, or you can just install drivers via repo.radeon.com.
Axman
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That's the thing, adding repos is where Linux goes from easier than Windows to mega-millions harder.
Which is why Mint and Pop are king, even though they're old and weird.
Which is why Mint and Pop are king, even though they're old and weird.
Adding a PPA isn't hard, it's simply not the Windows way of doing things. I believe all PopOS have done is add the official Ubuntu Launchpad PPA by default as literally everything else is included in the kernel. As far as I'm aware, Mint does not add the Launchpad PPA by default. It's package manager simply pulls whatsoever is in the Ubuntu Main or Restricted repositories, which will be out of date and limiting.
At the end of the day, if you enjoy learning new things and aren't set in your ways, you'll thrive under Linux. But make no mistake, Linux is not Windows, and not every OS has to behave identically to Windows. Linux is not hard, the Linux way of doing things is simply different by virtue of the fact that it's an OS unto itself.
People use whatever suits their needs best. If the Windows way of doing things is what you prefer, there's nothing wrong with sticking to Windows as an OS.
Here's a few screenshots of various games running under their respective launchers. Big pic warning. The compression used in XenForo won't do the images justice, but at native 4k they look amazing. All settings are at high with HBAO enabled where available. Furthermore, on an 8700k system running at 4.8GHz all cores synced across 6C/12T with 0 AVX offset, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR4 @ 3600MHz C16, and an overclocked 2070S with the power limit increased - Performance is fantastic, with literally no frame pacing or hitching whatsoever. One thing I do recommend is using Bottles as opposed to Lutris. Lutris is good, but I find the overall polish and support of Bottles to be better.
Gaming under Linux has reached the point whereby I'm actually surprised when a game doesn't run, as opposed to years ago when it was the other way around...
BF4 (still one of my faves):
Death Stranding:
Diablo III (one of my faves):
Gaming under Linux has reached the point whereby I'm actually surprised when a game doesn't run, as opposed to years ago when it was the other way around...
BF4 (still one of my faves):
Death Stranding:
Diablo III (one of my faves):
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Axman
VP of Extreme Liberty
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No, the fallout of it is.
What Linux distro and sorcery did you use to get Battle.net installed and D3 running?
My Debian 10 install with Lutris worked with Battle.net just fine. WoW and D3 played fine, mostly.
There is no fallout, I've added plenty of PPA's with no issues whatsoever. Modern package managers are vastly better than package managers of old.
KDE Neon 5.27.7. I just followed to prompts under Bottles for adding BattleNet. You have to use the latest wine-ge-proton8-13 or BattleNet keeps prompting for an update. D3 and D4 run perfectly.
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FSCDiablo
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Battlenet will run using versions of Wine other than ge-proton8-13 and so will any games, but it will constantly state there's an update available for Battlenet. This was also a problem under certain Windows configurations.
FSCDiablo
Limp Gawd
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FSCDiablo
Limp Gawd
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It could be an issue with the packaging of Bottles? I think I ran into some issues with the version in the Fedora repos, but so far never a problem with the Flatpak version.
Fair enough. Myself and many others on r/linux_gaming had issues with Battlenet constantly nagging for an update, when you clicked 'update and restart' Battlenet would close and not restart. Upon opening Battlenet you were still running the same outdated version.
Happened under Lutris as well as Bottles (and certain Windows installs). I will say, while I found Lutris good, I by far prefer Bottles - I was finding that under Lutris, if I installed a newer variant of Wine, it would apply the updated version globally across all my games; which isn't ideal. Bottles sandboxes everything far better.
Executioner
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OK so help and old fart here. Yeah I have used and installed Mint several times, but like others have said, I could never get games to work on Mint. So my question after all this talk about gaming: Which distro for gaming or do you have to use several different distro's for gaming? Any other software to install?
I use KDE Neon, and the only quirk I've encountered is the fact that you have to downgrade libpoppler-glib8 when installing Wine, this has only been the case since KDE 5.27. Performance is great, stability is outstanding, and it's well supported. I notice many are using Fedora these days, it may be worth a try? Perhaps FSCDiablo could elaborate in that regard?
As far as software goes, if you're running Nvidia you will want the latest drivers, the process needed to install the latest drivers is in no way difficult - I'll provide a link below. Apart from that, you naturally want Steam as Proton is awesome, you also want software to run third party launchers outside of Steam - I find Bottles to be the best in this regard, and being a flatpak it's simple to install under most distro's.
https://linuxhint.com/ubuntu_nvidia_ppa/
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FSCDiablo
Limp Gawd
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I've posted some on my distro changes over the years in a thread in the Linux sub-forum titles Feeling the itch for a change. I'm still using Fedora and it's been 99% trouble free. There was an update recently that caused issues with non-default screen resolutions that affected my laptop. I was able to bypass it with a quick Google as Fedora help is usually well documented online. I personally never enjoyed Ubuntu or some of the distros based off it like Mint. I liked KDE Neon that Mazz uses. Debian I love as a install and forget it distro. It doesn't make the best gaming distro but awesome for a simple desktop that you don't watch to change much, but you will have to learn to set up some things. Fedora is rolling release so it has better support for newer hardware and software which is generally a good thing for a gaming machine. Manjaro was similar and was pretty solid also.
For gaming software it depends on your needs. Steam works great if your games are there. I use Heroic launcher for GOG and Epic games. Bottles has worked great for everything else so far.
For gaming software it depends on your needs. Steam works great if your games are there. I use Heroic launcher for GOG and Epic games. Bottles has worked great for everything else so far.
How so?
I started using Ubuntu on WSL 2. Uggh. Maybe 40 years ago, I was OK with command line interfaces, when I worked for long forgotten (and misbegotten) Fortune Systems. We called ourseves the "unfortunate: to work there, because of the shit ways they treated employees.. Those were the days of DOS, also cli.
But I've been using Windows since the days of Windows 286, which was just a program launcher for Excel. I'm am still a Windows guy for my daily driver PC. So when I had to use Linux for a program that does not run on Windows, I ended up wasting several hours to do a task which would have been like 1 or 2 mouse clicks and drag-and-drops. Sudo, ugh. Case sensitivity, sounds good in theory but theory ain't practice. So then someone told me that Mint comes with a GUI built in. That would save me hours and hours to fix up Ubuntu with an X server, install a GUI (which one), and then a GUI editor, etc. So why exactly should I NOT use Mint?
Sure, I've gotten "soft" using GUIs. But so what. Life is too short to horse around with a cli.
I stated reason's why in an earlier post, but essentially as a distro it's become fairly stagnant. There's no roadmap in relation to Wayland support, in fact Wayland's been ignored altogether, and the WM still suffers from issues I was experiencing 8 years ago. Most distro's these days have a GUI's that support most needs without relying on terminal, but realistically speaking once you get used to terminal things are actually far easier - All you really need understand is the process your distro's package manager uses to install software, once you grasp the process everything else is copy/paste.
For transitioning Windows users, I believe the KDE interface out of the box is far better than the Cinnamon DE. Bear in mind that I'm in no rush to adopt Wayland, but developers need some form of roadmap as X11 isn't going to last forever.
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I've been running Manjaro as my daily driver for two or three years now. I'm not recommending it solely for gaming but because it is my daily driver. I have had some issues with it but I can't remember what most of them were. I do remember the majority of them had to due with installing software from the AUR. You must be careful about using that for multiple reasons and I keep the software I get there to a minimum and only things that aren't in the regular Manjaro repos. Luckily some of the software I originally installed from the AUR were added to normal Manjaro repos so I uninstalled the AUR version and started using the Manjaro version. The reason you will eventually have some trouble with the AUR is because the AUR is for Arch and despite being based on it, Manjaro is not Arch and does some things differently.
That said, I have few problems with gaming using Manjaro. The only real problems tend to be games which aren't going to work under any Linux distro.
I also tend to use the newer kernels when they come out (non-experimental) but also keep at least a couple LTS kernels installed just in case something happens. Luckily Manjaro makes handling that extremely easy with a simply GUI. Manjaro also has a simple GUI for choosing open source or closed source video drivers for AMD and nVidia without needing to add a repo or anything. By default it uses the open source drivers for both but a simple click on a checkbox for closed source drivers will install them.
You won't ever find me recommending Debian based distros. I've tried tons of them over the years but there's always been something about all of them which I never liked but could never pinpoint what it was I didn't like. I avoid them completely and haven't had any experience with them in years.
Executioner
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There was also another discussion on a different thread about Nobara was excellent for gaming. https://nobaraproject.org/
Nobara is really nice for gaming. It has a lot of gaming related changes patched directly into the kernel. This makes it so you cannot just run a different Fedora spin and try adding the Repos. Sadly it uses Gnome, which I find painful. There may be a way to use KDE on Nobara, but I have had no real trouble gaming on base Fedora with KDE.
Why do you say that? As a prospective Mint user, I'm curious as to what I would not get, that would be available from some other release.
That said, I'm no fanboy for Mint. if there is another Debian-based release that has a GUI as part of the install, I'm interested.
EDIT: Forgot to say that I have no interest in running games on Linux. I need Linux to run a specific program and to edit related text files.
AUR = ?? I'm a Linux noobie, sorry if this is something everyone else knows.
Out of curiosity, and I'm NOT trolling, why do you use or keep around more than one kernel?
If I am NOT a gamer, do I really need to have the latest NVidia drivers installed?
Again, noob question. What is "repo?
Deadjasper
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Satisfied Mint user here. I tried Debian but found it too "secure" to my liking. Mint does everything I need an OS to do. I'm not a gamer so games are a non issue.
Axman
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Pop has been working on their Cosmic update and it's taking up a lot of resources. Also they're a hardware company, first, and there's been tons of action on the hardware side of things in the past two years.
Linux Mint had some interface problems but I just looked and they published an update about a month ago, so maybe it addresses them. It's still the easiest to recommend for new users.
Repositories are, well, repositories of software that's compiled to run with your version of Linux. Repo for short. Now I haven't dailied a Linux machine in about 5 years, so if what Mazzspeed is saying about them causing less bloat and conflict, my experience is certainly dated.
The problem with repos is that you can just add one from another version of Linux and install whole parts of other distros to your install. In theory, this is fine, but it can also cause dependency problems, which is when you have a piece of other software, like say, part of a browser, and it needs to install part of a different version of that browser, and now you have conflicting dependencies, which again, you can manually work around (if you're adding distros, you're already under the hood, fiddling with nuts and bolts)...but it's that level of hassle that you wind up going "fuck it I'm going back to Windows/Mac/Debian/clay tablets!"
If Mint runs it, just install Mint.
Linux Mint had some interface problems but I just looked and they published an update about a month ago, so maybe it addresses them. It's still the easiest to recommend for new users.
Repositories are, well, repositories of software that's compiled to run with your version of Linux. Repo for short. Now I haven't dailied a Linux machine in about 5 years, so if what Mazzspeed is saying about them causing less bloat and conflict, my experience is certainly dated.
The problem with repos is that you can just add one from another version of Linux and install whole parts of other distros to your install. In theory, this is fine, but it can also cause dependency problems, which is when you have a piece of other software, like say, part of a browser, and it needs to install part of a different version of that browser, and now you have conflicting dependencies, which again, you can manually work around (if you're adding distros, you're already under the hood, fiddling with nuts and bolts)...but it's that level of hassle that you wind up going "fuck it I'm going back to Windows/Mac/Debian/clay tablets!"
If Mint runs it, just install Mint.
Distro's based on LTS releases are currently running Kernel 6.2, for some reason the Mint developers are still running 5.19 with the upgrade to 6.2 being optional. Once again, Mint is lagging behind every other distro.
Think of a PPA as a small, curated, Microsoft store - A repository of software. Once the PPA is added, driver updates will happen automatically (assuming you want them, you can opt out via a tick box under your GUI) along with system updates.
You don't have to run the latest Nvidia drivers, but at some stage you may find compatibility issues with newer kernels. Furthermore, the drivers in the Ubuntu repository are outdated and may not work with the latest hardware.
Think of a PPA as a small, curated, Microsoft store - A repository of software. Once the PPA is added, driver updates will happen automatically (assuming you want them, you can opt out via a tick box under your GUI) along with system updates.
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This isn't a problem anymore under newer package managers, I haven't encountered a dependancy conflict in a good three years at least.
Axman
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Good. How's the bloat? Not terribly concerned with install footprint, but that was an annoying issue (that Windows and Mac are just as guilty of through different mechanisms but that's no excuse)?
The AUR is the Arch User Repository. A huge repo of software compiled by Arch users.
I keep around more than one kernel in case I run into problems. So far I probably haven't encountered more than one problem but if there is one I have backup kernels so I can get back to whatever I was doing in literally a minute or two since all it takes is a reboot. As I already explained, I don't generally run LTS kernels but instead the newest non-experimental kernel Manjaro puts out. That means there could be problems and I have a quick and easy fallback in case there are problems.
Whether you want the newest nVidia driver is irrelevant. I put the info out there on how easy it is with Manjaro to install and use the closed source video drivers for those who want that option. It's dead simple to do in Manjaro compared to any other distro I'm familiar with.
A repo is a repository of software.
KDE Neon comes with only Firefox installed by default, it doesn't even come with Libre Office. As far as ram usage is concerned, KDE Neon is very lean, possibly leaner than many distro's running Gnome as their DE.
KDE Neon is based on Ubuntu LTS releases, but package management and updates are slightly different to the *buntu way of doing things. KDE Neon is also a rolling release in relation to the KDE desktop. There's three levels of release schedule regarding KDE Neon, I'm on the most stable branch - Generally speaking, those running KDE Neon see the latest DE updates before someone running Kbuntu (for example).
StoleMyOwnCar
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Thanks for this video. I was coincidentally looking to try a Linux distribution since I wanted to try out the Auto1111 Stable Diffusion WebUI with my (now retired for a 4090) 3080 Ti, but on Linux. At first I tried Arch since the guy loved it so much but uh... yeah after sitting there for around an hour with fdisk, when I got ready to actually write the partitions that I had to google around about how to set up (lol hex codes, having to switch to GPT manually, etc), I said, "Yeah no, I'm not messing with this crap". I'm a programmer by trade, but I don't want to waste my time programming things I don't care enough to. I would then have to install the GUI and like literally everything else on it. I just don't care enough to even try...
So I skipped to the opposite end and tried out Nobara. Nobara is great. I just downloaded the Nvidia version ISO, everything was up and running very fast. Wifi, graphics drivers, etc, all downloaded. Stable diffusion installed without much fuss (just some minor issues with their default installer, but not the OS's fault). Just needed gperftools for the tcmalloc, which installed through the Fedora cmd package download thingy without much issue. Tried out generating images, and it was much faster than Windows. The speed was much more stable, too. It's like within spitting (well not really but much closer) distance of my 4090 (with the 4090 on Windows obviously). I'm impressed. I might try gaming on it sometime, but that's kind of a secondary concern. Definitely recommend this OS for easy operation.
My only current complaint is the file sharing. I tried out the file sharing option and it was some Webdav crap, which my ES File Explorer on Android couldn't even try to access because for some reason the URL is hard coded to start with "dav://" and ES File Explorer wants http/https. This is pretty annoying. I need some way to preferably set up file sharing to android and windows devices from it, preferably without having to go through SSH/SFTP and private and public keys and that garbage...
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FSCDiablo
Limp Gawd
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For sharing files to windows machines you'll want SAMBA or SMB. Here are some Fedora docs to get you started.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/samba/
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/samba/
StoleMyOwnCar
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Thanks this doesn't look too bad to get up and running. When you fire it up and use the commands in the tutorial doc, do you know if Linux's Samba by default limits itself to being accessed via only computers on the LAN, or is it like world accessible? I definitely don't want the latter.
I think Windows uses Samba for its sharing on the backside as well. It baffles me why this operating system, while being so user friendly for the rest of the setup, would use this Webdav thing by default. Why not just come preinstalled with Samba, and then add some gui flavoring for that instead...?
I think Windows uses Samba for its sharing on the backside as well. It baffles me why this operating system, while being so user friendly for the rest of the setup, would use this Webdav thing by default. Why not just come preinstalled with Samba, and then add some gui flavoring for that instead...?
StoleMyOwnCar
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What is commonly used to under/overclock on Linux? I need to lower the power limit on this 3080 Ti quite badly.