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Diving into daily driving Linux (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by Parptarf@lemm.ee to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world

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I ended up with Nobara

As some of you already know I’ve been playing around on a small partition with Linux Mint. Learned basic troubleshooting and fixed some driver issues.

Now I’m very impressed with how it runs and decided to daily Linux and keep Windows for things Linux can’t do. Currently installing Windows on a new small SSD as we speak. (240Gb for the OS plus it’s gonna get a 500GB NTFS partition on my 2TB gaming drive)

This brings me to my question. Which Distro? I’ve narrowed it down to keep using Mint or Fedora KDE Plasma 41. Mint is something I’ve already screwed around with and there’s loads of guides online about it.

But Fedora seems like a better for for me. I’m not afraid of tinkering at all. But as long as I came game and daily it for browsing, emails etc. without too much issues, I’m good.

What’s the consensus? Setting it up tonight after my new W11 install is up and running.

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[–] cRazi_man@lemm.ee 35 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

You're going to get a hundred different answers about distros. There are a lot of knowledgeable people who forget what the beginner experience is like.

Mint is universally recommended and well loved. It works well and you can't go wrong. It uses Cinammon desktop environment and I wanted KDE so I didn't go for it.

Fredora is also top tier and again you can't go wrong. This comes in many flavours (including Bazzite which is an immutable Fedora distro pre-set towards gaming, or Nobara).

When you're wiping your drive anyway and setting up new and fresh, then this is the best time to install different distros and test drive them for a few hours/days. Ultimately this is not a life changing decision; and your choice can always be changed later.

I personally did all this a year ago and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been great and this distro doesn't get recommended enough. The desktop environment will be your daily use experience. The underlying distro will be your mechanics under the hood. I would suggest you pick something "beginner friendly" unless you really want to take on a steeper learning curve.

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago

OpenSUSE is awesome, they're undergoing a restructuring and rebranding right now. Which means that promotion of use and updates could be slow or even pause. They were asked to return to the community for a new governance model. They should emerge the other side with a different name and branding, as SUSE asked them to stop using the name. It's a transition time for the distro.

[–] ParetoOptimalDev@lemmy.today 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Mints outdated drivers can definitely cause issues for beginners.

[–] Parptarf@lemm.ee 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

It did definitely do that for me. Tried that and Pop.

Luckily this community helped me figure it out together with information found searching the web. If I wasn’t persistent and somewhat tech savvy I’d be stuck for sure.

[–] cRazi_man@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago

And this is why Linux is still far from mass adoption. Normie's will not be able to troubleshoot this stuff right out of the box. If there's going to be widespread adoption then Linux needs to come pre-installed and set up, and preferably unbreakable (like Steam OS).

[–] Tangent5280@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I've been using Mint for a while now, Haven't had any issues so far. What issues did you have?

[–] Parptarf@lemm.ee 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The kernel doesn’t support Mesa 25 drivers out of the box, so Radeon 9000 cards wouldn’t work properly. No games would run. Also the version of Steam downloaded directly from their website didn’t want to start, no window shows up and it just runs in the background.

Easy fix after a quick ~~Google~~ Qwant search. But someone who doesn’t have at least some deeper experience with either MacOS or Windows wouldn’t know where to start to fix such an issue either.

Other than this it’s been fine.

[–] Tangent5280@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I had to say this yesterday, and I guess the universe didnt like that.

My laptop shit the bed today morning. My work laptop, running Mint booted into a black screen, had to clean install to get the screen back on.

It broke again in the evening, but then I had TimeShift snapshots to recover with.

Need to figure out some way to either make it nimble enough to recover from the black boots quickly or fix them for good.

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

If you are going to game daily, I would recommend Nobara. Which is based on Fedora, but has all the gaming stuff precompiled/installed and ready to go from the start, Which makes getting started with gaming much easier. Its very user friendly to boot.

but if you just want an binary answer between Mint or Fedora, I'd say Fedora.. since you will still be able to find, install, and benefit from a lot of the Nobara stuff, even if its not included in the box from the start.

[–] Parptarf@lemm.ee 8 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Nobara is actually one I highly considered. But I keep reading that base Fedora is more stable.

Of that’s not true I love the features Nobara comes with.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's more stable. But as I understand, it doesn't come with any proprietary drivers or blobs, so you've got to do an amount of tinkering and configuring to get it running for gaming. Especially if you've got Nvidia GPU.

Whereas with nobara or bazzite, those features are baked in already, by professionals.

You need them either way, so my question is, who do you trust more? Yourself? Or the developers behind the gaming oriented flavors of Fedora?

I went with Bluefin, based on silverblue, based on Fedora. It has all the gaming stuff I need, plus like bazzite, it's immutable (ish), so while it's harder to do some stuff the normal Linux way, it's also significantly more stable, because nothing I do or install ever touches the core operating system files. I can't break anything, and this makes me happy 😁

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

nobara has a seperate iso for nvidia cards.

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[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Stability is a trap. It sounds automatically appealing but is so much more trouble it's worth for the benefits it provides, especially for a daily driver system intended for gaming, not a long-forgotten server running in a closet that's been doing the exact same thing for 20 years. The gaming ecosystem is not stable, new games are released constantly, new clients are released constantly, new updates and DLC are released constantly, new drivers are released constantly. You have no choice but to keep up and if your OS is not keeping up because it's "stable" you're in for a world of pain.

If you try to use a stable OS for an unstable goal you'll be fighting it all the time, ironically things will be broken far more often than any "unstable" equivalent, because you won't be able to get the latest rapid updates you need when you need them. To get things to work you'll have to force different updates into place one by one, piece by piece, then future updates will get broken because you'll end up with two copies of things that are conflicting one of which got manually installed.

Stable distros absolutely have their place, there's nothing wrong with them and they're typically the most used and popular distros because they are ridiculously good at doing what they're designed to do. But playing games on your desktop is not what they're designed to do.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago

I disagree that stable distros aren't good at general purpose gaming systems, they work fine unless you have very new hardware.

And sometimes the newer stuff csn bring more problems than a stable distro, depending on your hardware.

As an example, my system is an nvidia laptop with an external monitor. Unfortunately, the Nvidia driver is absolutely unusable under Wayland with this setup, which was a bummer for me, as I wanted to use Fedora with it, but starting with Fedora 41, X11 was completely phased out, so I couldn't fall back to it.

I'm not a fan of openSUSE tumbleweed or Arch based distros, which do still support X11, which left me with the more Stable distros. Mint worked flawlessly with my setup, and I have no issue gaming.

Tl;dr there's more nuance to stability vs bleeding edge, and both have their place.

[–] Parptarf@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago

That’s an excellent point.

I run a brand new GPU, I like to play both very old and brand new games. I sometimes overclock my hardware, I’ve been really into modding games in the past.

Stable isn’t really how my gaming ecosystem is on Windows either. Not to mention Windows, Nvidia, AMD etc have always had a element of instability to it. I’ve ran beta updates on my PC for years and also do that on my phone. The amount of times I’v messed around in regedit, cmd, bios, eventviewer etc. is beyond what I can remember. I’ve been adopting windows versions early since Vista came out too.

I’ve never really been happy with stable. Maybe I this question should be «Arch vs Fedora» instead, but I’m not cocky enough(yet) I guess 😂

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I mean, base Fedora probably is more stable.

Playing games requires an lot of extra stuff, and the kernal is more bleeding edge in nobara to keep those GPU updates (if AMD) and performance tweaks fresh and useful.

but generally speaking from my experience, Nobara is no more or less stable than anything else, windows or linux. And any issue I did rarely had was typically resolved with a reboot, and generally from a game.

[–] Parptarf@lemm.ee 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You guys might have talked me into Nobora actually.

I’ve not been someone who’s favored stability over new tech and performance on Windows, so why should I on Linux?

Also, like others have said, changing the Distro if I hate it isn’t exactly the end of the world anyways.

[–] imecth@fedia.io 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The main issue with nobara is that it's handled by a single person. Almost everything you get on nobara you can get with a few commands on the terminal in fedora; and whatever patches they have under the hood will at best get a marginal performance boost and at worst cause major crashes and issues.

Nobara is a solid choice for people that don't like to tweak their system too much because it comes with everything you need to play games from the get-go. If you're more of a power user there's very little reason to pick it over fedora or arch.

[–] Parptarf@lemm.ee 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That’s the reason I was considering Fedora instead. But I just installed Nobara, so I’ll see how it goes.

I’m VERY curious about Arch, but I’ll stay on this distro for a little bit(I think)

[–] imecth@fedia.io 1 points 2 weeks ago

Well Arch is great at what it does: getting you the latest packages of everything without needing to upgrade every 6 months or whatever; that does come at the cost of a bit less stability. There's EndeavourOS if you're uncomfortable installing from the console.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Any reason to go with Nobara over Bazzite?

[–] swab148@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Nobara is not immutable, which is a plus for some people. I'd use it over Bazzite because I like the ability to fix things that break rather than just rolling back to an older image and hoping that the next update unfucks whatever the maintainers broke in the last update, but some people are fine with that process, so for them there is Bazzite.

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Bazzite has never broke for me. One of the advantages of atomic immutable distros is that there's no rush to push a new image. Either the whole image is updated when it already works, or it doesn't get shipped. None of the issues of pushing a single package update without testing that later turns out to be incompatible with a different package update.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yeah exactly. Worst case, I reboot my system and it's fine again lol.

I see people sometimes try to act like immutable is only for newbies or people who don't like tinkering, and it's just not true.

It's beginner-friendly, sure. But you're really not that limited in what you can do, you just need to learn the different ways that they're done on immutable (rpm-ostree for example).

There is a slight learning curve, but after a few months, I really grew to like the entire concept of immutable and atomic. I'm not sure I would ever go back to Arch (if I want anything from AUR I just start up my Arch distrobox).

[–] swab148@lemm.ee 4 points 2 weeks ago

I have had broken updates pushed on my system with Bazzite, and the fact that I couldn't do anything about it just rubbed me the wrong way. That's just me though, some people are fine with rolling back to an older image, no hate lol

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

I have never used bazzite to give you an honest answer to that.

all I can say is that I was distro hopping for a good while after running into roadblocks on ubuntu, and Nobara is just where everything clicked into place with usability, and ease of gaming.

[–] brossman@infosec.pub 4 points 2 weeks ago

seconding Nobara, I've been using it daily for close to two years now and have been super happy with it.

[–] Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Another vote for fedora here.

I use regular workstation. I like gnome so that fits. And I found when I set up arch exactly the way I liked, I was just recreating the fedora experience ;)

It’s not bleeding edge but I don’t think anyone really needs that unless you just bought a brand new vid card or mobo etc. If your components are common and 6mo+ old fedora is new enough.

I really don’t have issues with it. It seems to have become the new Ubuntu (install it and it just works).

[–] INeedMana@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Most of distros use the same projects code-wise, some just add some patches or lag months behind. I mean, it doesn't really matter, just do it. You'll either be happy with anything or outgrow whatever you pick up now. And either sooner or later land using one that you will decide is absolutely the best, or just have vague preferences in the end
But it's the journey that does it, not a particular distro

[–] Parptarf@lemm.ee 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I like this answer!

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I'm sure Mint is fine but it's hideous so I've never touched it.

Bazzite comes with a whole lot of stuff out of the box that makes the Linux experience so much easier, and the gaming experience so much better, so that's what I usually recommend.

[–] WeLoveCastingSpellz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I find endeavor really simple. All the goodness of arch and it just works??? with AUR? Woah! I think you are better off choosing a desktop environmental. That really changes the experience rather than the distro. I am a big time KDE fangirl myself and will thrive on any distro with KdE Plasma on.

[–] Parptarf@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Ended up going with Nobara KDE. So far just about everything I've tried to do just worked flawlessly.

[–] WeLoveCastingSpellz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago

That is what I started with! Later I found it too unstable and caved in for endeavour. but hey enjoy, I had a great time with it.

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[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

As a long term Linux user I highly recommend the Universal Blue (immutable Fedora) spins. It's been rock solid on my desktop and 10x better on a laptop I thought was a lemon because Ubuntu would crash or do other weird things about once a week. The immutableness hasn't really caused me a lot of grief except when I tried to connect my 15yo printer (I just relented and got a new printer) when I had to go through a distrobox.

[–] hornywarthogfart@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Specifically, Bazzite uses these and I have been really impressed since switching my daily driver from manjaro to bazzite.

Bazzite also ships with a lot of gaming software and tweaks/fixes preconfigured which is nice if that is important to you.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Hah. I just went with Fedora on a new build, got all the way to setting up all the stuff I need that computer to do and found that it seems the power management is borked and sometimes it just decides to die on a black screen after being left unattended for no discernible reason.

That doesn't mean anything to you, but I wanted to whine in public about it. If you want to factor in my specific set of bugs feel free to do so, though.

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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I'm doing the same thing. Someone recommended Bazzite to me and it seems to come with a lot of the compatibility stuff ready to go. I haven't really gotten into it much but my plan is to dip my toes in with it and at least learn the names of the apps and what they do. After that If I want to switch I hope it will be easier. The biggest hurdle for me is just knowing what's what.

I do love the file browser on it already. I'm doing the same stuff with it I had to install 2 3rd party apps in Windows for.

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[–] wonderfulvoltaire@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

Fedora is a safe bet. Kinoite is their atomic distro and bazzite is a fork of that as well as steamOS which is great for gaming.

[–] CodeBlooded@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago

In my experience, Ubuntu and Ubuntu variants make for a great daily driver for someone who is new to Linux. When I started to get into Linux, I just found the most Q&A content and support for Ubuntu as I googled my way through it. This plentiful support was specifically geared towards newcomers, which I felt the other Linux communities lacked in comparison.

[–] banazir@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago

Of those two, I think Fedora is the better choice since the packages are more up to date. Fedora with Plasma is a great choice anyway. It's also a large distro with lots of online support. Try it out!

[–] JTskulk@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

That's the wonderful thing about distros, you can keep trying different ones until you find one you love or just get tired of changing lol.

[–] Parptarf@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I absolutely despise installing Windows. Takes forever.

Linux distros take like 10 minutes. I love it!

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[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Why though?

[–] JTskulk@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Sometimes you mess up an install, sometimes you just want to try different things and see what's out there. I had to do that a bit to get a sense of what kind of distros I like and don't like.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

I use zorin. I can use it right away after I install for most things and over time I have added a few things. I do find the gui software interface annoying (its an ubuntu spin so same as ubuntu) so either download the ubuntu option for things on the web so it is just like installing with windows or I do apt at the command line. Its good for running windows software but not necessarily gaming as it is by no means bleeding edge. So its all about stability and out of box usage that gives you an interface that is very windows like.

[–] mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

the simplest answer would be: just try them all by yourself and see which one fits. Try only the popular ones btw, otherwise you'd have a hard time finding supports.

Word of advice: dont mind the aesthetics, but pay attention to stuff like package managers / packages and community. Here is what I meant:

Unless you have special flavor from a distro like XFCE from Manjaro, any Linux distro can be made pretty. I can have Debian 12 on one computer and something like Arch on another, and I can still make both look exactly the same. So dont choose a distro just because it looks pretty, you can do that with any of them.
Packages and package managers are so important, those are how you get software on Linux. Debian has a lot of softwares in its repos. Arch's main repos do not have as much, but its AUR repos allow a lot of softwares to be installed.

Do you like apt, the manager for Ubuntu/Debian? Or do you prefer dnf, the manager for Fedora and RHEL? Package managers are more of a style really. I like Fedora's dnf but Arch's pacman is way faster.

Community is also important. You dont want to pick a distro where only a handful of ppl use it. It would be very difficult to get supports. Ubuntu / Mint / Debians are so popular that you can get answers from any forum.

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