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!
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.
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.
If I had to pick a recommendation from those 3 for a novice Linux install I’d probably pick mint.
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.
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.
