Keep noticing that when taking about Linux distro recommendations (on Reddit) users recommend Mint and Ubuntu for gaming.
Now don’t get me wrong, they’re great distros and with a bit of work are great for games, but I feel like theres better recommendations for new users looking into getting into gaming on linux.
Microsoft has been radicalizing me more and more these days.
I have an i7-12700k and an RTX 3080. I heard Nvidia is tricky because of drivers, but any issues with using intel CPUs with Linux?
Where should I, a complete noob, begin? I’m intermediately technical, moderate/semi-intermediate with command line, etc. Is Mint the best way to go?
I tried pop_OS! a few years ago but my computer couldn’t run it well for some reason - lots of lag despite having an i7 7700k at the time and installing it on a separate spare SSD. Reinstalled it twice but still had issues with noticeable lag in the OS. My specs were great, but that OS turned me off unless it has substantially improved since then.
not so much as Mint being the “best way”, but Mint being a safe, friendly starting point – once you get your feet wet, you can start looking around at the other options (which can be pretty overwhelming initially) – and just as a lot of people use Mint as a jumping off point, a lot of people also stay with Mint
and yes, despite distro-hopping being a running joke, it exists because Linux distros make it relatively easy to do
the biggest change to keep an eye on is the development of atomic (“immutable”) distros – anything that makes it harder to bork your system and easier to recover afterwards (including recovering all of your configurations and customizations) is getting a lot of attention
Exactly this!
That was my experience with Pop!_OS too. I tried switching to it after finding that Ubuntu has a lot of bloat.
In the end, I went back to Ubuntu, because it works right out of the box - even with my Nvidia graphics card! (only from 20.04 onwards; 18.04 and older versions were problematic)
When I reinstalled Ubuntu, I chose the custom / minimal installation option, and that cut out most of the bloat.
I’m personally not a fan of Mint - tried it for a month or so. My impression is that if it works with your muscle memory, it works well. If not… then even Windows ends up more user-friendly.
I’m particularly not a fan of the “start menu” because you don’t really get a lot of space for pinned apps, and there’s no way to really modify that. I ended up liking KDE quite a lot more. It takes a bit longer to set it up to what you like, but its customization means that while there’s a bigger upfront cost to setup, it’s much smoother once it is set up.
I’m using KDE Neon (Ubuntu + KDE), which I’m pretty happy with. But I’m also debating whether to switch to Kubuntu (also Ubuntu + KDE for some reason)