Hey I’m cell and my bf of nearly 2 years asked me to switch to Linux because it’s “obv way better then windows” (his words xd) and until now I always said no. I didn’t wanna learn how to navigate through a new distro all over again. I gave it some thought and decided to make it his “Christmas” present that I’m installing Linux on my laptop :3 if any of you can give me advice on what type of Linux, like arch, I should install and what I should be aware of would really help!
Contrary to what others suggest, do not use Mint. You want a distro that offers the KDE Plasma desktop. I strongly recommend starting with Bazzite if you primarily play games or Fedora KDE if you want more personal control. You could always start with Bazzite and switch to Fedora KDE later if you decide Bazzite is too restrictive.
I mostly use my laptop for school or video editing. But I’m gonna inform myself a bit more but if you say mint isn’t good for that kind of stuff then I will find something else :3 thank you though!
Video editing with open source software is still a bit rough on Linux, Kdenlive is there, but you will probably have a much better experience with Davinci Resolve. They have native linux support and most distros are well supported.
Mint should be fine for that. What I think this poster is encountering is that Mint does not always run well on the latest and greatest hardware. The Mint team favours a well tested and older base.
Bazzite and Fedora are a bit friendlier to newer hardware, but not quite as bleeding edge as Arch bases Distros.
Remember that starting with Mint and migrating to something else a year later is a normal and healthy Linux journey, as is staying on Mint for years.
Welcome to having choice! And in my opinion, being an kick ass partner
I tried a few distro over the years. They all had issues. Mint was the first one that “just worked” without fucking a round with terminal.
Put it on my parents PCs and they had 0 issues.
Fedora and KDE have more “polish” but in my experience the tradeoff is bug hunting and terminal use. Not something I wanted to get into moving to a new OS.
While this is purely anecdotal, Mint is the only distro I have ever consistently run into major hardware support problems. Others seem to confirm that experience, especially with newer hardware.
In addition to that, I absolutely loathe Cinnamon and Mint does not natively support KDE by design. It’s an awful recommendation for new users because it feels outdated and clanky and they are far more likely to run into compatibility problems than Fedora, which has always worked out of the box for everything I’ve tried, and I have tried it on quite a lot.
My opinions are opinions, but I strongly feel that steering new Linux users toward Mint sets a bad first impression.