A friend is due for a gaming PC build. But he’s super pissed it needs to run windows 11. I told him just run something else. He said his job needs something that runs windows-only and on the odd occasions where he needs a desktop to do something he’s not buying a second computer just to run windows.
Dual booting exists but Microsoft likes to clobber boot loaders. So I reminded him he could just run windows 11 in a VM when he needs to, everything else in bare metal Linux.
He’s now sold on moving to Linux.
The question is where should he start? It used to be as simple as “if you aren’t sure, use Ubuntu.” But his use case kinda seems like what everyone has been crowing about using bazzite for.
I have zero experience with bazzite but the page does describe something built for his use case. There are 3 concerns I have though.
- Is it common enough that he can Google an answer?
- it’s an atomic distro, so classic Linux answers he might find online won’t always be applicable here.
- selinux, ugh.
What’s a good gamer Linux distro? He’s not super into tinkering. He just wants it to do the thing without Microsoft’s invasive bullshit.
LMDE 7 and send it. Regular mint has Ubuntu nonsense baked in, lmde is basically the same end user experience and smooth Debian jazz underneath.
Like someone else said, steam, heroic.
I’d avoid any of the gamer distros.
LMDE is missing various useful programs, such as the GNOME disk utility. Just stick with stock Mint if you’re going Mint.
I cloud spin up a VM and check, I’m 99% sure you’re wrong. Also lmde includes almost the same preinstalled programs.
or…
apt install -y gparted
Well it was missing something I needed when I tried it a while back.
Which Ubuntu stuff does Mint Cinnamon have? I thought the point of Mint was that they removed a bunch of that stuff like Snaps.
Mainline mint is a derivative of Ubuntu. Lmde is largely the same OS with a pure Debian heart without Ubuntu clogging the arteries
Yes, I know Mint is downstream of Ubuntu, that’s how I know it doesn’t include Snaps. What exactly other “nonsense” is there or was your statement just a general LMDE puritan hand-wave?
I’m an ubuntu hater / snap hater. I prefer my mint without junk in the trunk. I’ll confuse people though, I think systemd rocks. And let’s make more people mad, vim is a pointless flex and nano is better.
Nobara is alright if you just want games to work without tinkering etc
It’s also developed by glorious egg roll, the GE in GE-proton. I wanted to love it but Wayland + multi monitor + KDE + Nividia = pain
Are you talking about scaling monitors at a different rate in a multi monitor setup? I thought they’ve fixed that.
Everything except nvidia is how I use it and it works very well. I have had a few issues with kde once but never again since then