Hello guys i have a qustion about which distro i should use?
I want to dual boot windows and linux
I just want a safe place away from microsoft eyes to do edit and drawing and other hobbies on my pc. And playing some games like cs2 & 2d games Also the distro run my wallpaper engine Should be popular distro so if i have a problem i can ask about it
Please dont tell me linux mint because i tried it 3 times and everytime i do anything simple the distro goes off and i should re install i won’t give it anymore chances thank you 😖
Edit: thank you guys for typing your suggests. after some search i will give bazzite try and if won’t work like i want. I will go with the other suggests I really enjoyed reading all your suggests
Based on your last paragraph, you might fall in the supernoob catergory. You’ll want an immutable distribution, you can’t break those Unless you tell it to let you break it.
As a windows user, you’ll find familiarity in Fedora Kionite.
If you prefer a touchscreen oriented experience consider Fedora Silverblue.
There’s a few other options on the page I’m linking, I haven’t tried and therefore can’t recommend either of the others.
https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
Edit: my formatting was 🗑️
Edit 2, electric boogaloo:
OP in your post you state you want Wallpaper Engine to work, unfortunately, you’ll have issues there. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with wallpaper engine you may be able to do the same using KDE Plasma. I personally use a VLC command line call to enable animated wallpapers on my rig, there’s not exactly a standard for it on Linux so many of the solutions you find will be clunky. Just remember if you go around messing with your xorg.conf file you need to have a backup of it so you can undo changes easily in a terminal.
You’re welcome to DM me if you need assistance.
For a more gaming-ready experience, Bazzite might suit you:
People seem to love bazzite, is it all its cracked up to be?
I’m happy with my lmde htpc/server/gamingrig/clusterfuck so I’m not planning on changing, but I’ve been in the market for a handheld gaming PC and its been on my list to try.
No, Bazzite is very hardware dependent. Good if you use the same hardware as the devs. If you don’t, it’ll make you want to go back to Windows.
I’ve learned so much Linux on Nobara and i feel like it’s not mentioned much, not it’s got an active discord and gets regular updates
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
You say not to suggest mint, but you most probably used an Ubuntu based Mint so that doesn’t count.
theres a new one made by a microsoft enginer as a hobby project called Anduin OS it is very simmilar to windows based on ubuntu it can be downloaded at https://www.anduinos.com/ and a video by mental outlaw can be found at https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=bQAUFgS657w i personally never tried it and it is a hobby project but it looks promising
I suggest BazziteOS. I have it installed on 2 of my computers for about a year and it works great. It runs KDE and it looks similar to Windows but is much better. Also, I believe it has support for Wallpaper Engine, though I haven’t tried it.
It is Fedora based and Fedora also has a sizeable community for any questions and tutorials you may have.
The reason why I recommend Bazziteos is because it comes out of the box ready for gaming, you would have steam, wine, lutris, etc installed almost instantly and ready to play.
I just finished downloading bazzite and now creating a backup on flash for both bazzite and windows using ventoy because i know myself i will do something stupid to make me re install systems
Chances are that, if you do break something, it’ll be on the Windows side.
Bazzite is very solid for new users as it’s very convoluted to access and modify anything system related.
Having said that, if you have any intention to learn how to use Linux distros, and eventually remove Microsoft from your life, immutable distros like Bazzite will limit you dramatically, so I suggest you start with a regular “mutable” distro. Now, if your intention is just to have something that works, scape Windows every now and then, and come back to Windows, it’s hard to beat an immutable distro.
I’m pretty sure you can also advance with Bazzite. I haven’t done anything too advanced, but I can imagine one can learn a lot simply by learning the ujust commands as they would apt.
Absolutely. Maybe I’m a bit biased. I can’t stick to anything immutable (other than my Steam Deck, and believe me, I’ve tried many times), and always come back to distros I can have absolute control over.
However, I have all my employees running Silverblue (mostly because none of them even know what CLI means 🤣).
If you’re new then fedora is great
It’s worth noting that fedora is heavily sponsored by RedHat (a subsidiary of IBM) and is the upstream testing ground for RHEL (Redhats commercial offering). RedHat also has close ties to Israels government and it’s military.
This is a huge dealbreaker for someone like me so I feel it’s necessary to mention.
Not to get into politics but the whole point of Linux is about being open and used by anyone from anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to see various parts of the Linux kernel, drivers, etc developed/funded by people from Israel, Russia, and many many other countries.
Edit: the point of this message, this type of approach to your OS choice will ultimately result in throwing your PC in the trash if you dig deep enough.
There is a vast difference between a community driven project like Debian taking small contributions from people who happen to be in Israel/incorporating some things from RedHat after lots of vetting and diluting and Fedora being a direct upstream testing ground for RedHat who are the primary contributors and maintainers.
No, this type of approach will not lead to you throwing your PC in the trash, it will simply lead to you being more aware of your software and how it functions,what it contributes to, and what contributes to it. Which is a good thing imo.
For example, I use LMDE. Yes, there are most definitely contributions from redhat in my machine. the difference is between
RedHat engineers -> Fedora.
And
RedHat engineers -> Fedora -> Upstream Project acceptance-> Debian -> LMDE.
I’m not saying you need to stop using Fedora. But everyone draws a line somewhere and I’m simply making my knowledge on this known for people who’s line may be in a similar place to mine.
If your computer can’t handle Linux Mint, then either you do something wrong, or your computer is really unstable. I won’t ask you to use Mint, but I will say, that I use it on three different computers, and not a single problem anywhere. Dual-boot is notoriously unstable - mostly due to MS… So my advice is, to use a computer for Linux by it self…
The age old question. You have to understand that Linux the kernel is made in such a way that anything built on top of it will always require way too much from the user. It feels like something made from programmers for programmers, just like how UNIX was designed. No distro will be able to change that. Windows is packed with bandaids to make it behave closer to what users expect, but anything that comes from UNIX has it’s focus in making the code nice, not making ordinary users happy necessarily.
So picking a distro is entirely a choice on how you wanna interact with the kernel’s interfaces, but they’re still the same interfaces. No pretty UI will change that.
Just make sure that the distro you choose has a mature community behind it and that packages are being actively maintained. Make sure that if you file a bug report it will get some attention. That’s the only thing you should care about in a distro, everything else is flashy nonsense.
Edit: Also as you can see by the replies to my comment, Linux is kind of a cult, so beware of that.
Android runs an only slightly modified Linux kernel, and yet the OS requires much less from the user than e.g. Windows or MacOS.
Chromebooks run a bog-standard Linux kernel and the target audience is kids.
My car’s entertainment system runs a standard Linux kernel, and the UX is so cut down that PC expertise really doesn’t matter when using it.
MacOS and iOS, two systems known for their ease of use, both stem from BSD, which comes from Unix.
The kernel has nothing to do with this.
In fact, the only mainstream kernel used in user-facing operating systems that doesn’t “come from Unix” is Windows. Everything else is derived either from Linux or BSD, which both are derived from Unix.
There isn’t even a mainstream phone OS anymore that doesn’t “come from Unix”.
If you don’t root your Android, you can barely do anything. The UI on Android hides all of the ugliness of the implementation and that shows up as jarring bugs, which you can do nothing about as an ordinary user. If you use the manufacturer’s stock OS it’s always a horrible experience as well. They also use kernels which are very far from upstream and have a ton of custom proprietary patches. That’s exactly my point regarding flashy nonsense. And that’s exactly what Windows does as well.
Chromebooks rely on containers and web apps, but once you need to configure your OS, good luck.
MacOS and iOS rely on the company’s complete control of their hardware, OS and apps. They have the most closed system out there and rely on things not changing too much. They also expect users to pay for every little inconvenience.
I’ve been using Linux for plenty of years now, I’m a fan, I love the model, I love the way it’s developed, but I also recognize the issues it has. I love programming and going deep in the system, but that’s not what ordinary users necessarily want. That’s just the reality, the kernel is not setup and documented in a way that would allow easy comprehension and configuration. If you don’t have that, then what can a user do when they have to configure the OS and you always need to do that for one reason or another. Companies like Canonical tried to market a model of keeping the system stable and comprehandable, but it never worked out in practice.
If you don’t root your Android you can even run a full desktop Linux in a proot container. You can run all Android apps and Linux apps on it. Using Winlator you can even run most Windows apps and there are emulators for most systems out there. If you cann that “barely anything” you are lacking imagination.
Apparently you haven’t used Chromebooks or MacOS, but you clearly misunderstand the topic at hand.
There’s always a balance between configurability and stability, and every single OS, even Windows, falls somewhere on that spectrum. If you allow a user to break their system, the downside is that they can break their system.
iOS, unrooted Android and ChromeOS fall on the “less ability to break your system”-side with Windows and MacOS following rather closely, and different Linux distros are on the full spectrum in between. Immutable distros make it harder to break yous system at the cost of immediate configurability, while running Arch you can do whatever you want and you’ll likely destroy your OS while doing so, if you don’t know what you are doing.
Again, all of that are choices done in user-space, nothing about that comes down to the kernel. You can make any Linux distro entirely unbreakable by taking away sudo rights for the current user and making every non-temporary directories and files read-only. You can do that in 10 minutes and suddenly there’s nothing the user can do to break the system. But the user also loses a lot of abilities. Again: all of that is user-space only and has nothing to do with the kernel.
And yes, there are enough stable and comprehendible Linux distros out there, but if the user has sudo rights and the constant and uncontrollable urge to destroy their system, they will find a way to do so.
