[Update: I went with CachyOS instead, it looks like a great option for gaming with general usage and has a really good wiki]
A coworker of mine asked me to help him install Linux, he hasn’t tried Linux before but he’s sick of Windows.
He is very much into gaming, so gaming support is the first priority. He is also a developer/tester so I suppose that he will also want to have access to dev tools, languages, and other packages like that for personal projects.
My first go-to when recommending to newbies is Mint because it’s simple, tried and tested, but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience. However it scares me that there’s no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks and brew, or even podman images. Will this be a problem as he uses the OS for general usage besides gaming in the long term, would it be better to just go with Mint and set that up for gaming instead?
Feel free to also recommend other distros, but keep in mind that while he is technical, he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
Recommend the one you use yourself so you are able to help them in the best way possible.
This is usually a good idea, but I think Arch would be a bit too much for him
Still, any Debian derivative would be just as easy for me to help and also for him to find help online, so that’s the main reason I’d choose Mint over Bazzite
I moved my gf to Kubuntu, all she knows is double click starts her games, open konsole - press up arrow - hit enter to start the G13 kb and every so often click that round icon with the blue dot for updates whenever she feels like it (or something stops working). Oh yeah, kernel level anti-cheat is a dead stop under linux, if he plays any of them, he needs windows so far as I know.
I put flatpak as the default instead of snap (10 seconds), she is now as comfortable as she was under windows, I have also not needed to support her much (except for the stuff I forgot to setup). and for the love of god make sure you show your friend “TimeShift” can’t say enough how great that app is, you can
break almost anythingtinker to your hearts content and recover in minutesYou could put him on to cachy os, iirc it has graphical package management and is built on arch.
Yes, but CachyOS might not be, and while it does a bit to make things substantially easier for your friend, you’ll have a lot of familiarity with it as an Arch user.
Source: An Arch user for 15 years who just installed CachyOS when I wanted to switch from Cosmic to KDE.
I’ve been using Pop!_OS for gaming for a couple years now and it’s been great. It’s Ubuntu-derived like Mint, and I haven’t had much difficulty troubleshooting it, since a lot of the stuff on Ubuntu/Mint forums will work for Pop.
I’d actually recommend whatever it is that you use, OP. Having a friend who is intimately familiar with your distro is way more helpful than one that’s theoretically even better but you have limited support for. If they want to make the jump later, they can always do what I did and somehow accidentally become an arch (btw) linux guy after a year in the ecosystem (goddamnit how did this happen, i just wanted to keep using my old craptop, not become a thigh high socks guy).
edit: I’m reading that you’re also an archfreak, so I’d suggest Manjaro instead. It’s got an easier learning curve and guis, but is arch-based.
Bazzite 100%. It’s the best out of the box gaming distro, and bonus points for immutability (not that your friend needs to know what that is).
Bazzite 100%. It’s the best out of the box gaming distro
Does Mint require tinkering for games to work?
Yes a little bit if you have an Nvidia card, and Bazzite has the option to boot right into a Steam Deck like interface which is great for controller gamers.
To be clear Mint is a totally fine choice too, but for gaming and especially for a total Linux newbie Bazzite is the choice.
Yes a little bit if you have an Nvidia card
Interesting. I have an Nvidia card, but had no problems with Mint.
It was about a year ago so maybe it’s improved since then. One specific hiccup I recall with Mint that I didn’t have with Bazzite was getting acceleration in a browser. I’m certainly not recommending Nvidia users avoid Mint!
Definitely not bazzaite, it has lots of unremovable bloatware and since it doesn’t have native package manager it will be a problem. For gaming i propose cachyos, it focuses a lot on performance in games. They have their own proton, kernel and they even had their own browser
has lots of unremovable bloatware
Such as?
I havent used it for few month so i dont remember too much but i do remember bloatware such as discord overlay, like some unofficial linux client mod
Yeah I don’t even have discord, let alone any kind of overlay…
No native package manager? How does Bazzite manage packages then?
rpm-ostree, brew, and dev containers. I haven’t felt the lack, but it is likely not for everyone.
Also distrobox
Flatpacks
Using something called rpm-ostree. rpm-ostree is a hybrid image/package system. It combines libostree and libdnf to provide atomic and safe upgrades with local RPM package layering. Still that isnt real package manager since you cannot remove or install anything from fedora repo, it is only used for updates and thats all
Fedora KDE.
Steam and Heroic work fantastic on it.
Has its own App Store for searching for stuff.
Looks similar-esque to Windows so getting around is less painful.
Definitely support this recommendation. Having switched to this from windows a few months ago I can say that it is very stable (after I fixed secure boot issue) and very pleasant to use. Solid built-in apps. Tried GNOME first. Its design was good but just not for me.
Yeah i was going to recommend Kubuntu but the 24.04 LTS is a bit outdated although it’s very stable.
Fedora might be a better alternative.
Bazzite is just Fedora KDE but immutable and optimized for gaming
what does immutable in this context mean? I am guessing you can still install software on bazzite
Basically, your OS drive (for the most part, there are exceptions) is read only. Every time your PC boots, it is initialized to your current OS image.
Yes, you can install software on it. For the most part, you default to flatpak, but it also comes preinstalled with distrobox that allows you to access any package manager from any distro you want. You can also install local RPM packages, but you have to update those manually.
They suggest you try to avoid it, but you can also “layer” packages onto your OS image using rpm-ostree. This basically adds the package to the image that initializes at boot. You usually only have to do this with things like VPN software. Maybe.
The result is an extremely stable OS. almost boringly so. Because updates and installed software aren’t applied until the system is rebooted, it’s essentially impossible for an update to break your install.
Also, rolling back to a previous OS image is trivial and takes like 30 seconds.
It’s definitely an adjustment if you’re already used to Linux, but it’s really not that restrictive, it’s just different.
Thanks for the explanation!
I’d say Bazzite but I would warn him (and since he’s a developer already it might not be a big deal) if he’s looking to do any sort of dev work or whatever with Bazzite then prepare to utilize stuff like distrobox, flatpaks, etc to accomplish stuff like that.
That being said as a dev and gamer myself if my first linux experience was Bazzite I might get annoyed. Mint is a great first experience. when I originally tried it well over a year ago though I did have issues with my Nvidia GPU on it and gaming wasn’t super great BUT it’s been awhile since I’ve used mint so that may have changed.
Honestly I would suggest start with Mint and just drive it for a couple weeks. If he likes it but feel it’s limited for some things then that’s when he can expand out to different distros. And like I said maybe gaming on Mint has improved since I last used it. But if he’s comfortable with running distrobox and containers then Bazzite is fine.
I’d say Bazzite but I would warn him (and since he’s a developer already it might not be a big deal) if he’s looking to do any sort of dev work or whatever with Bazzite then prepare to utilize stuff like distrobox, flatpaks, etc to accomplish stuff like that
That’s what I figured, I would be very annoyed to have to use images for software I would simply do an apt install for in other distros, so I’ll leave out Bazzite from my options definitely
Bazzite has a developer edition OS image
If he’s a dev, he might actually prefer it. Just explain and let him decide which one he wants to try first.
And then when he try actually tries it everything breaks and he spends hours trying to get udev working from a distrobox container.
Why would it break?
Sorry, I mean “it simply doesn’t work”.
You might just want to recommend fedora with the caveat that he’ll need to do a little setup with drivers. Bazzite and nobara are both fedora distros.
So, all downstreams have no added value?
That’s not what I said. My experience with nobara personally hasn’t been great and while I use bazzite at home for gaming PC but wouldn’t recommend it at this moment because it seems that the dev team is having some drama. I use cachy daily and find it wonderful and super easy. Not the arch difficulty that I was expecting. It’s a downstream.
Oh yeah I was quite annoyed with bazzite initially with embedded toolchains… The default arch distrobox also runs vscode variants horribly with tons of freezing for some reason. I had to create a new arch distrobox.
Also Saleae Logic2 has a Fedora bug where it takes between 2 and 10 minutes just to open because of logfiles and errordumping and timeouts that is very annoying.
Also menu shortcuts for distrobox only work like for 20% of programs (luckily code-oss is one of them)
And don’t get me started on running a VM that can see the local network…
After you get a setup going though, then it is breezy though.
Mint for the community support. He’ll have tons of resources if he runs into anything and you’re not available. As a dev he should be resourceful in that regard.
But definitely check the kinds of games he’s playing. Modern multiplayer games will be a big hurdle if they’re not steam verified.
People who want to play games with kernel level anti-cheat won’t be happy with Linux. If that’s a must, they’d need to look for other solutions. For all others, Mint is great to get started. Most people just want their computer to work with minimal hassle. That’s what Mint excels at.
I agree with this. I even went with LMDE instead of the main Mint and there have only been a few small things I had to really fiddle with to get working how I wanted.
Having so much documentation that is actually correct and useful is a godsend to a noob like me.
He should start with Mint, learn the system in general, and then move to Bazzite, CachyOS, Pika or Nobara, which are more game centric.
Bazzite has newer drivers, ditto for CachyOS Handheld Edition for another SteamOS clone.
he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
Of the two options you gave, I’d go with Mint. If your friend runs into a problem, it would probably be easier to diagnose the issue since it’s just Ubuntu/Debian under the hood.
Once they get used to it, they can try other gaming specific distros if they want to try to get a little more performance.
I do not have first hand experience, but have been told that while Bazzite is excellent for gaming, the immutable nature of complicates matters when it comes to software development, dev tools and stuff of that nature.
I think Bazzite is the “easiest”. But I think it would be very difficult to tinker for someone not used to Linux. It’s the plug and play option. For me the fact that bazzite tries to be immutable is a very good plus for stability on the long run. And somehow fits well for gaming on Linux. The drawback is that these immutable distro are hard to tinker with if you dont have experience with immutable package managers and so on.
CachyOS has maybe a more traditional structure but should offer good performance too.
There is also Nobara and Pop OS.
I’m on PoPOS but it’s too recent for me to give feedback for gaming. But it should work well too.
I use CachyOS for over a year. Mainly for playing.
If he’s a dev, he probably is able to follow this guide:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guideThe result is a system, that has virtually every package you can imagine in the aur, always the newest packages - which is quite important for gaming performance and a really slim system.
For the gaming part I recommend Gamescope:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GamescopeAs desktop Plasma is a good choice for beginners. However I personally use Sway.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Plasma
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SwayI installed Arch for the very first time this past weekend. I am a software engineer with almost 30 years experience and some time less with Linux. I did my research beforehand: I watched a manual installation on YouTube and I went over the wiki.
And the manual installation was hard. I would not recommend it to a beginner.
he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
This isn’t Arch, sorry. My own Arch didn’t boot the first time (but yes I was able to fix it quickly).
This was my opinion too. However like a year ago my best friend asked me: “Hey, I want to try linux. Which distro do you recommend?” I told him, that I recommend Linux Mint for beginners. And that I use Arch. Like a day later he wrote me again: “I’ve installed Arch, lol. Wasn’t that hard. The guide is actually very straight forward.”
This changed how I see Arch today. Arch isn’t super complex or hard to use. It’s just a bit more time consuming to set up. On the other hand it just works once set up.
I built a new gaming computer a month ago. After a couple hours of research, I chose Nobara. It was by far the easiest experience I have ever had setting up an OS and everything has worked flawlessly so far. Even my wife who isn’t tech savvy at all has no issues using it. I cannot recommend it enough to new users who want an easy time gaming. I’ve been a linux user for almost twenty years, but I just wanted something easy that didn’t need tinkering and Nobara delivered.
