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this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Note here, a lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
I disagree. Obviously the most ideal solution would be the have immutable Mint, but beginners need stability more than they do immutability. I've used mint and my only issue with Mint was that I didn't like how it looked. I'm currently on Bazzite and these are the issues I've ran into:
Every time I start Firefox it asks to be made into the default browser. Even if I click yes it will still ask again next time I start Firefox.
When using the default audio sometimes the audio signal to my monitor cuts off which means I no audio comes from the speakers. If I tell the system to send the audio to my other monitor and back to the one I have hooked on the speakers then it instantly works again. It's almost like the system forgets it has to send out audio. I don't remember what I did to fix it but it definitely wasn't beginner friendly.
Sometimes one of the monitors freezes and only one. The second monitor keeps working just fine. So far haven't found a permanent solution for this issue.
There have also been some minor artifacting that I personally don't consider an issue but someone else might.
Overall I can put up with the issues because I've pretty much conceded that I'm going to have issues. But I don't think new users should be using a system where they're going to run into problems they're most likely not equipped to fix. That why I recommend Mint to newcomers because all the fancy bells and whistles don't matter if the system doesn't work. Mint doesn't have bells and whistles, but it just works.
I recently tried switching to mint from the dark side, but the instability made me go back to Windows. I'd say everything doesn't 'just work' on mint at all, unless you have the most basic needs in your usage. Whenever I've tried to raise the issues with seasoned Linux user, the answer has been "well, most regular people don't need to do that specific thing".
So if it's true that Mint is the only Linux distro that "just works", then Linux is definitely not even close to being suitable as a mainstream choice. Which really saddens me, as I felt much better on a moral level using mint, but I couldn't live with the little annoyances that kept popping up. So now I live with the annoyances that pop up in windows instead .
As someone who switched from Windows to Linux Mint about a year ago and had a pretty easy time adapting, sometimes I see the advice that beginners should use an immutable distro instead of Mint and am inclined to disagree, but then I remember the Linux Mint subreddit has like, at least one person a week who somehow manages to accidentally install the GNOME desktop and makes a post like "Wtf I started up my computer and it looks weird now why does it look like this" lol