I - a complete Linux-illiterate - have spent the last seven months trying and mostly failing to get Linux to work on my desktop.
What went wrong? Well, you name it!
I think the main issue here is the mindset of “installing a new distro will fix it”. Unfortunately, a lot of people online push that idea. If it’s broken on Mint and Bazzite, it’s probably a generic Linux issue.
The second issue with Plasma sounds like it could be related to Wayland and fractional scaling.
@stuner @JoshsJunkDrawer well, it’s not entirely true, this is not on Mint or Bazzite but installing AUR packages on manjaro, you do not see the results immediatly but the AUR on manjaro is…well, there’s a reason why it is not recommended at all, you begin to install an AUR, then with a 100% probability, your manjaro will break after some time, this happened to me multiple times, this never happens on EndeavourOS for example, nor Cachy
I’ve used Debian more than any other distro. It’s the Toyota 4Runner of the Linux world, in that it may be late to the game when it comes to it’s design and tech, but what it does use is mature and reliable.
The thing you gotta remember with Linux is that, unlike Windows, it gives you access to all of the controls and the entire instruction manual. You have so much control that you can straight up tell it to delete itself, and as long as you include the
--no-preserve-rootflag, it’ll happy comply.So, with that in mind - Linux Mint is great for transitioning non-computer people from Windows to Linux. But, as with most Linux distributions, some advanced configuration might be required for expanded capabilities, such as playing Windows-only games on steam, running a DAW with external hardware, and other things of that nature, due to Linux’s immense flexibility with so many architectures and configurations.
I too am back on Mint after years wandering the wilderness. It’s really good.
Honestly, yeah. Bazxite looks neat, but it’s new and I’m still not sure what the point of it is, beyond a little bit of nerdy software management features.
Ubuntu is … gestures vagely … Ubuntu. Regular debian doesn’t really work well for steam related activities, and I haven’t actually tried fedora in ages but it looks to be doing okay at least.
It’s just, mint is so basic, but that’s honestly its greatest selling point. I love having good fundamental be the main selling point.
I’m glad Mint just worked for you. I installed it on my wife’s laptop my mother-in-law’s laptop (former didn’t want Win11 spyware, and latter didn’t want spyware + her ancient laptop can’t support it) and they’re both running excellently. I use CachyOS on my desktop and laptop, and those run incredibly smooth. Mint really does just work.
Sorry your experience was very rocky, but I’m glad you got there! 😅
I think it’s useful, when introducing people to Linux, not to just call it “Linux.” Because, thinking they’re all the same, they might go and install Arch or something.
Instead, tell them to try “Linux Mint.”
I’ve taken to calling it GNU plus Linux
Well, that’s a subset of distros, so just plain Linux covers more of them.
Did you seek help for any of your issues? I feel like there was probably a simple fix that you just needed to be pointed to.
I don’t understand how Bazzite didn’t work. But hey, I’m glad you found success anyway.
I have personally found Bazzite’s installer to be particularly brittle.
Which one ? The one it had up until a few months ago ? I haven’t tried the new one yet.
I installed Bazzite a few days ago, and it was a bit of a pain.
Damn. It was supposed to make it even easier. What issue did you have with it?
Well…
I recently burned a Linux Mint live ISO to a thumb drive for repairing a PC that isn’t booting right into Windows. The ISO is about 2.8GB in size, doesn’t take that long to download or to write to a thumb drive. It also fits on a DVD if you’re still living in 2007. Bazzite’s ISO is 8.9GB. Takes a lot longer to download and longer to write. Bit of a pain.
Once you’ve got the ISO on a thumb drive, it boots to the typical GRUB menu asking “Install Bazzite, Test this media and install Bazzite, Quit or something.” Test this media is the default choice, and it fails and tells you not to use that media.
They offer a Live ISO version of Bazzite, though it’s marked as in beta. This allows you to use KDE’s settings to set things like scaling so you can read the text from the couch when setting up an HTPC. Problem is it tends to lock up. Through the time consuming process of picking options in the installer, the mouse cursor will just stop moving, and the only thing that works is Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get to a terminal and reboot the machine.
The plain installer doesn’t let you rescale the video, so pull an office chair into the living room to 4k your way through the installer. Anaconda…isn’t good. It’s got some of that Gnome minimialist jankiness to it. Mint’s installer is a series of screens you can go back and forward through, it’s a process. Anaconda is built like an N64 game, first you start out in the mandatory tutorial level where you do the language, time zone, keyboard layout, then you arrive in a hub level where you can choose the order you do things in…for some reason. This leads to a weird structure.
There’s a DONE button up in the very top-left corner of the screen. Not near the middle where all the other interaction is, Not near the bottom-right where most people who read left-to-right, top-to-bottom would look to finde DONE, way in the top-left corner. Which is real fun to keep going between on a 4k monitor at 100% scale when the installer is designed for a 1080p monitor or less, and the mouse sensitivity is low. It also means that the DONE button can mean BACK or FORWARD depending on context, like in the partitioning menu, you select Manual partitioning and then hit DONE, and it takes you FORWARD to the manual partitioning dialog, then you click DONE again to go back to the main menu. But if you click automatic partitioning, DONE just takes you back. Mint’s installer is a linear series with a BACK and NEXT button that make more sense.
If you’ve got a system with more than one drive, and you want to put the root file system on one drive and /home on the other, especially to separate a game library or something, you have to do it the manual way. They give you two manual options, one doesn’t make sense. The other is a LOT fussier, you have to just know to make a /boot/efi, a /boot as EXT4 and / and /home as BTRFS, it takes a lot of clicks, it asks you if you’re sure a lot, and it throws a cryptic error and crashes out of the install if you get it wrong. Oh, you also have to know it’s /var/home, not /home as well. Like, the whole immutable thing just makes it more fussy about what its file system looks like. Can you even add a drive after the fact? Can an immutable distro be FSTABed?
It’s just…jankier. Having done it, I wouldn’t point a newbie to it.
Oof. What a journey.
I wish we could go back in time and evaluate each of þose issues. Some seem really oddball - like “I’ve never heard of þat happening to anyone” oddball. You get Arch installed and everyþing working… but can’t get Libreoffice to install? I’m intensely curious about þat one.
I’m glad it all worked out in þe end, þough.
I’d be curious how Zorin OS would fare. It’s another Ubuntu based distro that’s simple and easy to use out of the box.
Typical linux experience. Still better than microsoft shitware…
Everything fine. Your experience is not exceptional, I’m afraid
