edit: Fedora it is then!
He will be running the AMD 9800 X3D w/ RX 9070 XT, B850 motherboard.
I am deciding between either Fedora (probably KDE) and Bazzite (also KDE), but I’m not sure whether an atomic distro would be better/worse for a newbie.
As far as I understand, atomic distros can be easily rolled back after an update, but you are unable to use apt/dnf/etx, you need to use Flatpak, I think. Would that be limiting for the average user? Also, does Bazzite have better driver support for newer AMD hardware compared to Fedora?
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite or aurora if you don’t like gaming is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
I use both Mint and Nobara. Nobara is on my gaming rig, and Mint is my daily driver laptop. I agree that KDE is better than Cinnamon, but I do feel like Cinnamon is more streamlined for folks who don’t want/need all the bells and whistles that come with KDE.
Also, I read somewhere that full support for Wayland on Cinnamon is slated for this year.
I haven’t used Bazzite, but comparing against Nobara, Mint’s updater and graphical software store are way more polished.
Also, every once in a while, I find that some application that I need is only distributed as a .deb (such as the AWS VPN Client), so it’s nice to be on a Debian-family distro when that situation arises.
I feel like just getting Fedora KDE would be fine. Maybe I will try Bazzite first and see if the atomic-ness is too limiting.
Fine but still a downgrade to reliability
Immutability is a double edged sword. I bricked my drive permissions trying to get Bazzite to let me change my login screen background. Everyone assumes that immutability will prevent these sort of things, but for me, switching to a non immutable distro (Garuda) meant I didn’t have to muck about in the more touchy settings because I didn’t have to fight the restrictions in the OS anymore.
Right click image > set as wallpaper > both
It would be nice if it were that easy, but the login screen settings are in the immutable portion.
I don’t care anymore though, I switched to Garuda and everything works as expected out of the box.
That’s just not true I did it with this method on a clients computer three days ago.
Great, maybe they fixed it. Still don’t care because I moved on to a great system a few years ago where that didn’t need to be fixed.
Right but if the issues are fixed then immutable is the right choice for beginners.
maybe it was a double edged sword years ago.
Look, I’m not going to study immutable systems for other potential problems just to argue with you. I’m just pointing out that sometimes you can’t predict what will cause a problem for someone and there are other easy to use options out there, so people can make well-informed decisions.
I’m sure Bazzite is great, I liked it well enough while I was using it, but it wasn’t until after I switched to something else that Linux started making sense to me. Bazzite may be harder to break, but for me as a Linux newbie, it wasn’t “better” and it felt weird to use in a way Garuda never did.
There are countless documented issues that are fundamental to non-immutable systems, your example is both not a fundamental issue with a design and has been fixed. It’s not good info.