Hi! You may be sick of these posts by now, but I have been having a very hard time selecting between three distros; that being OpenSUSE, Fedora, and Linux Mint. I have tried linux in the past, I did debian with cinnamon and ran into some issues, so I ended up sheepishly reinstalling windows and getting AME10. I want to give it another shot though, and I have settled on one of these three. I am an absolute beginner to linux and i’m a g*mer (laugh it up), so out of these which would be better? I don’t have too many preferences, I guess I would like to avoid CLI’s as much as possible but it’s not too much of a big deal. I could get used to it and learn the commands. If you can give a bit of advice, that’d be great and I appreciate all of you! 
Mint is always my recommendation for a Linux beginner. It’s the most “it just works” distro I’ve ever messed with, and has plenty of documentation for anything you’d need.
As for advice: I know you want to avoid the CLI, but try to poke around in there and learn it some. Once you get used to it, you can accomplish a lot of things even faster than through GUI applications.
thanks for the advice! i think i’m going with mint.
I love openSUSE and think it’s one of the few distros that has a pretty good implementation for every DE/WM. GNOME, KDE, Xfce, lxqt, enlightenment, mate, sway, etc… are all a solid experience on openSUSE.
That said, I have never found a distro with a good Cinnamon experience other than Linux Mint. Probably in part due to cinnamon being developed by mint, but regardless, if you want to use cinnamon, mint is your best option.
thank you, that seems to be the general opinion i have seen online. i am writing this on linux mint, thank you to all of the comrades who helped me pick it
Mint is cool, linux is cool, and you are cool too. Enjoy
aww thank you!
If I had to pick a recommendation from those 3 for a novice Linux install I’d probably pick mint.
would you recommend another distro? if so i would love to hear it
Sure. I didn’t want to originally as I hate being that guy when someone asks “x or y” shouting “try z!”, lol.
If you are primarily planning to game on the computer, I’d recommend popOS to new to Linux users. System76 has some good tweaks for gaming performance behind the scenes and excellent driver support all out of the box. You can get all of these benefits on other distributions, but it’s work to get them that I wouldn’t recommend to someone not yet pretty comfortable in Linux.
Beyond that, there are 2 others I’d recommend to keep an eye on, maybe not jumping in as your first foray into Linux, but are really good once you have some confidence built up. Those are Bazzite (an immutable fedora off shoot built around gaming, even as a steam deck replacement os but the desktop version is also pretty great as far as my experiences) and Garuda (rolling release arch derivative also geared toward gamers, is usually pretty impressive in benchmarks compared to other distro out of the box). Bazzite has a lot of those same popOS tweaks out of the box, and primarily uses flatpak for stuff you install, so you don’t need to update your entire system just to keep discord happy. Garuda does a good job holding your hand compared to vanilla arch and has a lot of handy stuff setup and installed out of the box, but it is a rolling release so expect to run updates often (for this reason I’m not a fan of using it on an only occasionally used system). Bazzite does recommend against dual booting in the traditional sense using grub, they recommend removing other drive with an os during install and then using bios to choose what to boot, and that’s the biggest reason I’d recommend being more comfortable before trying it. You know your comfort and skill level better than anyone else here.
All that said, I’m not discounting Linux mint - it’s a great os choice for all around use, especially coming from windows. But it may require more tweaking and fiddling to get the best gaming performance out of compared to something built around gaming. Ultimately, same thoughts about fedora - it’s a great all around os, but if your primary concern is gaming it might take more work to get the best experience possible. Not to say your experience will be bad without all that effort either, it’s all to be taken with a grain of salt.
thank you! i will keep that in mind when i inevitably start hopping distros after a while
I pickup Fedora because I like the name… completely arbritary.
Fedora -> A type of hat -> Red hat
I’ve used Fedora, and I think it is not an easy distro for beginners, especially if you don’t know your way around the terminal. My experience with OpenSUSE was so-so, but I have a negative image for it not being vanilla enough. Linux Mint would be the right choice for you.
But given your political inclination, I’m assuming that you probably also might have strong feelings for Stallman’s philosophy of hardcore GPL adherance and disdain towards proprietary copyright ones and maybe even permissive copyleft licenses. None of the above distros are for GNU-purists, if you are interested in going all libre. But that path isn’t easy, as most drivers out there are proprietary.
One thing you need to understand - most of us don’t play games a lot, but rather into open source contributions. Personally, I like NixOS, but if I had the privilege to, I’d jump to Guix.
thank you for the insight!
What was so-so about your experience with OpenSUSE?
My experience with Tumbleweed was so weird - in the way that I never got to experience it properly. I was bummed with Nvidia drivers breaking after every new kernel update on Fedora, so I wanted to try something stable. This was around the time Leap came into existence. By the time Fedora was on GNOME 40, they were still on GNOME 3. There were a bunch of third party, non-vanilla apps, and I felt out of place. But that was just me trying out the live USB, and I thought to myself that I can make them Vanilla after I finish installing. Also, I didn’t care about the older GNOME version a lot. The biggest issue was me trying to install - the Tumbleweed installation never finished for me - I waited for more than three hours, thinking that maybe it has to do with a slow download speed. I tried using a bunch of other older release ISO, and it still had the same issue. I was tired of this, and went back to Fedora.
I did debian with cinnamon and ran into some issues
This might be important; perhaps consider telling us about the issues you ran into.
I am an absolute beginner to linux
Honestly, you should be fine regardless. But it’s undeniable that -due to Linux Mint’s popularity amongst new users- you’ll likely have an easier time finding solutions to problems you might encounter.
and i’m a g*mer (laugh it up)
Once again, either one of these should be able to suit your needs. You might have to relearn how you access your games, but that’s true regardless of whichever distro you end up choosing.
one of the main reasons i use my computer is to call my friends, as we live pretty far apart now. we use discord, whose voice feature was almost entirely broken for some reason, and i couldn’t convince them to switch to matrix.
we use discord
Fortunately, Discord has (very recently) started to officially support Linux as a flatpak.
awesome, i hope it works on my second try
I distro hop between several distributions and I keep coming back to linux mint. I would say it’s the best distro to use if you want to avoid the CLI as much as possible. It has a large amount of users so you’ll find no shortage of support, can’t recommend it enough.
My typical recommendation for anyone new to Linux looking to get their feet wet would be Linux Mint. As long as you keep the system updated, it should be a decent choice for gaming.
The following is not to discourage you, but to help keep expectations in check. Gaming on Linux is not perfect. It’s not comparable to gaming on Windows. A LOT of games (with the assistance of Steam’s Proton) “just work,” but things are not to a point where that’s ever a guarantee. I would recommend looking up your staple games on
to review Linux compatibility, if the games run or need additional run options.
I say all this as someone who runs exclusively Linux, and is a gamer and occasionally streams. It’s perfectly doable, but expect to have to get your hands dirty at some point in the venture. And don’t be afraid to ask questions!
Linux Mint Debian Edition. Second choice would be Fedora.
I have to recommend Linux Mint. I’ve been using Linux Mint (Cinnamon) for over seven years now as my only operating system (and no dual booting) without any major issues or any desire to “distro hop.” Cinnamon has also gotten a lot more stable during that time too. I have almost no crashes anymore.
thanks for the recommendation, linux mint+cinnamon has been great so far.
Give nobara a try. It’s fedora with focus on gaming. Mint is always a good option. Personally I use endeavour os, pretty straight forward to install but maybe a bit too barebones if you don’t know what you need yet.
I would go with Mint because it has the largest selection of apps. Of course you can run any Linux program on any Linux distro, but with Mint you are able to just install almost anything without difficulty from a package manager like synaptic, or the built-in Mint Software Manager. That includes game launchers like Steam and Proton. This is, in my opinion, what makes Mint OS truly the most beginner friendly Linux distro.
Fedora is good too, but you need to grant it access to other sources of apps before you see the wider selection of apps outside of the more limited, strictly FLOSS apps that are available by default on Fedora. And these extra steps of finding trustworthy sources and installing them makes Fedora a bit harder to use, at least for beginners.
thank you! i am on linux mint!
