I’m installing a second disk in my desktop, and I’m going to install Linux.
I’ve had dual boot on all my machines since forever. As in decades. I’m an old hand. Perfectly happy in a terminal.
I have Mint in (on?) my laptop because lazy.
I’m asking about QOL. The only “Gaming” I do are flight Sims, and although I haven’t tried, I believe X-plane is Linux native. However, I do use some apps which are not Linux native, so I’d need some form of wine or performant VMs.
The PC is a Ryzen 9+64Gb, so it should handle a lot of things quite well.
I’ve been playing with both in VMs, but I can’t get a feel for what my virtualization and wine use would be.
BTW, I might do an install of both, maybe side to side, without commitment to either, and then decide. It’s going to be a blank slate install anyway.
From my trials, both seem comfortable enough.
I’ve heard good things about both.
Opinions?
Suse
Tumbleweed? Slowroll? Leap? Aeon? Kalpa? Which one?
I was thinking Q, Suse Q.
Why not stay with Mint when you’re used to it?
Personally I love OpenSUSE and don’t like atomic distros. But my first instinct is to recommend the familiar. Mint should be able to do what you want as well as the other two.
Because I may like it better? No harm in trying something different. I always have Mint to fall back to. You could call it slow cycle distro hopping :)
I suggest Mint, don’t know if you’ve tried it but it seems like the best choice.
Bazzite is a gaming focussed distro and if you don’t really game you don’t need it. I tried using OpenSUSE and it’s really apparent that they’re focused more on system administrators than desktop users (and system administrators are the only ones they monetize).
In all seriousness, do you actually have any problems with Mint? Can’t really answer if we don’t know what you’re dissatisfied with in your current setup. I myself tried OpenSUSE because I wanted to give KDE a shot.
I’ve used mint for ages. Most flavors, and tried most DEs. I use Mint in my laptop currently.
It’s like jeans. You can wear them for ages, for most every situations, but at some point you may decide to give chinos a try. Also comfortable, versatile, but different.
opensuse if you want to modify the system, bazzite if you just want to do gaming (immutable)
Wine is still a thing, but most people prefer Proton for gaming.
The easiest way is to install Steam and play your games through that. Non-steam games can be added with “add a non-steam game”, and then you can choose to launch them with proton though the settings for the shortcut you created.
I can count on one hand the games that havent worked for me using this method, and it applies to any distro. I’ve never even considered doing a full VM for a game, i’m not even aware of a game that would work under a VM but not Proton.
Check out ProtonDB to see if your games work, and if any tweaks are required.
Wine is still kind of a thing, as in it’s what is underneath Proton, the base.
I installed OpenSuSE Slowroll yesterday. I felt underwhelmed by their bad documentation. Their nvidia installation driver wiki was wrong, and resulted in the drivers not working (not all packages were pulled through via dependencies). I opened a bug report and they did a few changes to the wiki very fast (thanks to a nice suse engineer), but the overall wiki page remains utterly convoluted. And I’m mentioning this because even if you might not have to deal with nvidia, the rest of the system receives the same care. YaST is an eye sore with the worst UIX ever designed by man. And after installing the drivers and updating the system, now systemd takes 1.30 minutes to journald it – out of nowhere. It’s just a weird distro, with no attention to detail for end users, imho.
Regarding Bazzite, is a gaming distro. If you only play 1 kind of game that works with Mint, stay with Mint (or Debian-stable).
Wine will never work properly for apps. Sure, it manages to load a few apps, but they are crashy. Reimplementing the Windows API is a massive task that won’t finish for decades. So I suggest you use Linux-native apps instead. I moved from Photoshop to gimp3 too, even if I had the last non-subscription version on CD and it kinda worked with wine (but not really). Same with Affinity Photo, that many people suggest to run on wine, it’s super crashy on wine. So, avoid windows apps via wine. Games do work because they use very little of the windows api.
In other words, stay with what you know works without headaches (Mint), and move to native Linux apps, and Steam for games. I’ve been using Linux since 1998 and I’m comfortable with the terminal too, but I don’t enjoy having troubling installations. I’m at age now that I want things to just work.
I have seen your posts here for a few months and you are far more knowledgeable than I am in Linux. However, I have to say I disagree here. I did use Slowroll for two months and found no problem, nor a need for much wikis, if any… now, I dont have nvidia so maybe that is why. The main developer of Slowroll is awesome (personable and reachable) and his professionalism is what make him not categorize his Slowroll as stable so it is not listed as such. He has previously mentioned the challenges he is facing with the concept, but that can be addressed in due time. Most people in OpenSUSE should use either Tumbleweed or Leap for now.
Regarding OpenSUSE, it is a tad behind Fedora in refinement but minimal. Its biggest handicap, however, is its small footprint in the Linux marketplace, yet still amazing what they had pulled off with their limited resources.
Your beloved Mint, oh gosh, how much I tried to like it, but aesthetics and lack of flexibility kills it for me. It is, hands down, the less problem free one, no questions, it is what I recommend most for someone that need a set-it-and-forget-it distro, Mint is still the one. But I just cannot work happy with Cinnamon, even when first started in Linux. One system in the same ubuntu branch that I found almost as reliable as Mint, but with fairly new KDE, is TuxedoOS; more stable than Kubuntu, a bit less than Mint, and close in freshness as Fedora/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
Bazzite is imo the laziest and most hands free way to use Linux. If that’s your jam, use it.
It’s worth it to note for people switching that your network printer is unlikely to have usable scanning functionality with flatpak scanners you install (unless something has changed in the last 6 months since I tried last)
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I had a bad time getting Bazzite working and ended up switching to CachyOS, which I have been happy with.
That’s incredible.
Imo whatever problem you had is probably way easier to solve than managing an Arch derivative medium term… Anyway I wish you best of luck.
Honestly, so far I have had no issues at all, I just run an update every now and then. I assume it’d be more difficult if this wasn’t a gaming-specific partition, as that means I haven’t installed much else.
What didn’t work for you? I’m struggling to get UE5 working and thinking about trying something else, but everything else has been pretty great.
It took me ages to get it installed as it couldn’t cope with my EFI (I have multiple boot partitions). I had issues getting games running once I had it installed, but I can’t remember what specifically those issues were as I spent longer fighting with Pop (WiFi driver issues).
They both worked fine for me, but installing almost everything through yay on CachyOS instead of having to deal these on bazzite (link below) was a huge QoL change for me. That and the sheer amount of documentation for arch is just awesome.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/
To me, this was a mess and was convoluted. It helped me learn a ton, but if you want simple and need more than just gaming on steam, it’s not worth it imo.
Yeah, I probably gave Bazzite less of a chance because I had so many issues installing it. I believe I had to wipe my other Linux partition to get it installed in the end.
You can just install through yay on distrobox on bazzite. Again, laziest distro ever just copy paste whatever the devs give you for install on an appropriate distrobox. No need to worry about what distro you’re running.
Idk that installing a different OS to install software is better than installing another os to install software. I feel like that would just be keeping up with updates on two or more separate OSs, but with that said, I’ve never used it aside from just goofing around a little trying to get some theming stuff to work, which did not.
To each their own though, would be a great solution for someone that doesn’t want to uninstall their current system because they’ve sunk time into it or other reasons.
Distrobox has very little overhead and runs the app as natively as possible, last I checked my overhead was like 50mb of ram. It’s kinda like WINE but for distros.
I’d pick openSUSE Slowroll. Easy, monthly updates, comes with YaST system tooling.
If you have more than one monitor, I’ve found bazzite only boots up using one of them.
A more general distro might meet your needs better if you have more than one monitor.
I use Bazzite with multiple monitors. Can you clarify what you mean when you say another distro might meet OP’s needs better if they have more than one monitor?
I figured it’s possible. I didn’t think there is an easy way, at least that I could tell, to switch the out of the box configuration to use more than one. At least from the gamescope UI it boots into.
I thought it might be a limitation of that compositor.
Oh, are you talking about the special big picture mode or whatever it’s called? B/c I use the full desktop experience.
Interesting.
I don’t know if you’ve read about atomic distros yet, so here’s a link to that. Personally I’d pick OpenSUSE over Bazzite because I don’t like the idea of updates possibly overwriting anything I install myself that isn’t flatpak/distrobox/homebrew, but that’s not a dealbreaker for many, it’s just a different way of installing software that ensures the operating system doesn’t get packages installed that can make it unstable.
I wouldn’t be too worried using OpenSUSE in particular as it has excellent snapper integration that makes it very easy to roll back any changes made to the system that might cause said instability or inability to even boot to desktop (especially with grub-btrfs set up).I’d pick OpenSUSE over Bazzite because I don’t like the idea of updates possibly overwriting anything I install myself that isn’t flatpak/distrobox/homebrew
In atomic distributions you would install non-sandboxed programs in a layer that is applied on top of the base system. When your system is updated, that layer is applied back on top of the updated system. The only possible breakage would be if what you installed depends on a dependency in the base system that has been removed or which is no longer compatible.
From what I see, Snapper is similar, at least in concept, to Timeshift in Mint, which has saved my ass a couple times.
What @BCsven@lemmy.ca said, anytime you add or remove or update your system snapper does a little snapshot which makes it incredible easy to boot back into a system that works. BTRFS makes it so easy, as compared to EXT4. And yeah Timeshift is still just as valid I guess but unless you make timeshift backups every times you install or remove something, it’s hard to compare the two.
Similar benefit. Snapper and BTRFS on OpenSUSE means anytime you make a change to the system (add or remove packages, alter boot stuff, services etc, all through GUI tools) the system is snapshotting the changes and addingvit to the grub menu as another boot choice.
OoenSUSE is highly stable but should something go wrong by your own meddling you can be back to working just by a reboot. If the system is as you want after the boot to an older snapshot you issue sudo snapper rollback, that tells Tue system to keep that branch as your default
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No wrong answers.
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