this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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It depends on who’s asking. But if it’s someone who is curious about Linux, it’s always Mint.
If someone is new, show them DEs and recommend based on that
I think that can come later. I think decision paralysis would be a problem.
Yeah. "I use OpenSUSE tumbleweed, but have reasons I've been thinking about switching. I consistently hear that mint is a good place to start, or maybe pop!os if you're looking to run games"
I don't actually even say the first sentence unless the question was "what do you use?"
Sometimes, if it's clear they're trying to revive very old hardware I might help them search for something built around being lightweight.
I'm mostly happy with tumbleweed, except that I have the nvidia repo set up and am convinced that it's causing issues. One of these days I'll look into how to try the nouveau drivers and/or how to get from my current setup to dualbooting pop!os without disrupting things I need for work.
Also, an update straight up broke emacs while i was in crunch time once, but I learned to be more careful about my update timing.
People having problems on Tumbleweed almost always seem to be using Nvidia, KDE, and/or Wayland. That's what I've noticed based on official forum threads, anyway.
Yep. I got a thinkpad a couple years ago that was enough of a deal that I forgave its nvidia GPU. I followed the documentation on how to connect a repo controlled by nvidia, and since then: a) the actual GPU appears to be used, but b) maximum brightness on the screen is significantly dimmer, and games run worse than they did when the GPU wasn't actually used.
And also I use KDE. I'm still on X11, though, so I didn't complete the set.
Haha. Well, I hope you get it worked out. Have you used PopOS before?
I haven't, but a colleague (small all remote web dev outfit) plays rocket league and had said that pop!os has felt great for games without having to tweak anything. Meanwhile, I tried to play through cult of the lamb while some friends were all playing through it and it wasn't playable
Games run great in Linux Mint.
Mint also has a GUI driver manager that makes it really easy to see and change which nvidia driver you’re using.
That's good to know, thanks. I don't get asked for Linux advice that often, but I'll just recommend mint unless there are extreme hardware restrictions (which I'm sure mint can work with, but I've looked for whatever modern lightweight-focused distro is when it's a concern)
My guy just uninstall the Nvidia driver, it will fall back to the driver in the kernel, which is the Nouveau driver.
I'll try that soon. Tbf, it's absurdly easy to roll back with snapper if I make a change and it's not better, I just haven't gotten around to it.
I try to avoid telling people what I use as they will wonder why I don’t use mint if I recommend it.
I like Fedora + plasma, but I don’t want to explain rpm fusion and Fedora flatpak problems.
Would Aurora be a better recommendation these days?
https://universal-blue.org/
Am I understanding this right? It's Linux installed to a remote server and then streamed to the desktop?
Not familiar with it, but one thing mint has is a long history. That’s important to me.
And a lot of support, especially aimed to the beginner userbase. Most basics questions a first time linux user will encounter are usually answered to by searching the forum
It even goes beyond that because if you just search how to do something in linux, you are almost guaranteed to find instructions that work on whatever random site you find. It’s pretty rare to find instructions for dnf or pacman without also having the APT instructions right there.
Great point! I hadn’t even considered that.