So Mint is the ‘distro’, which is actually based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. In simple terms, a distro is a bundle of programs and configurations assembled for you. Basically, Debian is a stripped down version of Mint.
A ‘desktop environment’ is a separate program(?) that changes what your desktop looks like, and they can be downloaded on any distro. So you can try out KDE Plasma on your Mint installation! The one that you’re likely using right now is called ‘Cinnamon’, which I personally didn’t like and turned me off of Linux my first time trying to switch over years ago.
Something cool about KDE Plasma is that you can download themes and make your desktop environments look really cool. For instance, sometimes I like to rock this Windows 7 theme: https://www.pling.com/p/2142957/
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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 is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets 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, lmde 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 went to Manjaro (Arch) with KDE from Mint about 5 months ago, and it’s been nearly flawless, allowed me to easily install a real time processing kernel for audio production, and it’s run every game I’ve thrown at it performs better than Winblows.
If it works for you, that’s great, but you’re lucky so far and it’s a ticking timebomb.
I used to give manjaro to a lot of people because i was an arch user and supported a bunch of linux users, it was a massive mistake, arch is just a strictly better version of manjaro, the things manjaro claims to do it doesn’t do well because it’s just kind of hacked onto arch. Let me give you an example of something stupid that manjaro does:
normally, in linux, all packages are upgraded centrally, however, manjaro has decided to make an exception for the kernel, and now the kernel is versioned, and each version upgrades separately… this can result in you being stuck with an ancient kernel. I had to go into peoples computers, boot into a console, manually swap out the kernel, and put on the latest one, because the updater wouldn’t update due to the newest drivers being incompatible with the old kernel.
This happened enough times, that and the concerns raised in manjarno make me think it really isn’t for anyone. The team is laughably incompetent (they can’t even get their certs sorted out? really?) and you don’t want an incompetent team running your desktop.
If you’re enough of an expert to fix these things… just use arch, it’s strictly better. If you don’t know what you’re doing, an arch based distro is a terrible choice and you should go with bazzite.
I used to give manjaro to a lot of people because i was an arch user and supported a bunch of linux users, it was a massive mistake, arch is just a strictly better version of manjaro, the things manjaro claims to do it doesn’t do well because it’s just kind of hacked onto arch. Let me give you an example of something stupid that manjaro does:
normally, in linux, all packages are upgraded centrally, however, manjaro has decided to make an exception for the kernel, and now the kernel is versioned, and each version upgrades separately… this can result in you being stuck with an ancient kernel. I had to go into peoples computers, boot into a console, manually swap out the kernel, and put on the latest one, because the updater wouldn’t update due to the newest drivers being incompatible with the old kernel.
This happened enough times, that and the concerns raised in manjarno make me think it really isn’t for anyone. The team is laughably incompetent (they can’t even get their certs sorted out? really?) and you don’t want an incompetent team running your desktop.
If you’re enough of an expert to fix these things… just use arch, it’s strictly better. If you don’t know what you’re doing, an arch based distro is a terrible choice and you should go with bazzite.
I’m willing to troubleshoot infinitely over matrix for free and have 15 years of experience, feel free to message me!
Oh okay! Thanks, that’s helpful. So EndeavorOS has pretty frequent updates then? I’m ngl since switching I look forward to them, which is funny! It’s like “oh cool my computer got better and also new toys instead of worse and more bloated!”
Ahh I should’ve done this years ago but better late than never
Yeah, it should get updates exactly the same as arch. And I’m the same way, I check for update every time I log in lol. It does feel nice that you’re always up to date
I went with Mint but I’m thinking about KDE (or maybe KDE flavored Arch? Idk I’m new) on my second computer. Pretty painless?
So Mint is the ‘distro’, which is actually based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. In simple terms, a distro is a bundle of programs and configurations assembled for you. Basically, Debian is a stripped down version of Mint.
A ‘desktop environment’ is a separate program(?) that changes what your desktop looks like, and they can be downloaded on any distro. So you can try out KDE Plasma on your Mint installation! The one that you’re likely using right now is called ‘Cinnamon’, which I personally didn’t like and turned me off of Linux my first time trying to switch over years ago.
Something cool about KDE Plasma is that you can download themes and make your desktop environments look really cool. For instance, sometimes I like to rock this Windows 7 theme: https://www.pling.com/p/2142957/
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 is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets 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, lmde 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 went to Manjaro (Arch) with KDE from Mint about 5 months ago, and it’s been nearly flawless, allowed me to easily install a real time processing kernel for audio production, and it’s run every game I’ve thrown at it performs better than Winblows.
Manjaro is legitimately a terrible choice and should not be recommended, https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
If it works for you, that’s great, but you’re lucky so far and it’s a ticking timebomb.
I used to give manjaro to a lot of people because i was an arch user and supported a bunch of linux users, it was a massive mistake, arch is just a strictly better version of manjaro, the things manjaro claims to do it doesn’t do well because it’s just kind of hacked onto arch. Let me give you an example of something stupid that manjaro does:
normally, in linux, all packages are upgraded centrally, however, manjaro has decided to make an exception for the kernel, and now the kernel is versioned, and each version upgrades separately… this can result in you being stuck with an ancient kernel. I had to go into peoples computers, boot into a console, manually swap out the kernel, and put on the latest one, because the updater wouldn’t update due to the newest drivers being incompatible with the old kernel.
This happened enough times, that and the concerns raised in manjarno make me think it really isn’t for anyone. The team is laughably incompetent (they can’t even get their certs sorted out? really?) and you don’t want an incompetent team running your desktop.
If you’re enough of an expert to fix these things… just use arch, it’s strictly better. If you don’t know what you’re doing, an arch based distro is a terrible choice and you should go with bazzite.
Yeah Manjaro + KDE is kinda what I was thinking, thanks!
Manjaro is legitimately a terrible choice, https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
I used to give manjaro to a lot of people because i was an arch user and supported a bunch of linux users, it was a massive mistake, arch is just a strictly better version of manjaro, the things manjaro claims to do it doesn’t do well because it’s just kind of hacked onto arch. Let me give you an example of something stupid that manjaro does:
normally, in linux, all packages are upgraded centrally, however, manjaro has decided to make an exception for the kernel, and now the kernel is versioned, and each version upgrades separately… this can result in you being stuck with an ancient kernel. I had to go into peoples computers, boot into a console, manually swap out the kernel, and put on the latest one, because the updater wouldn’t update due to the newest drivers being incompatible with the old kernel.
This happened enough times, that and the concerns raised in manjarno make me think it really isn’t for anyone. The team is laughably incompetent (they can’t even get their certs sorted out? really?) and you don’t want an incompetent team running your desktop.
If you’re enough of an expert to fix these things… just use arch, it’s strictly better. If you don’t know what you’re doing, an arch based distro is a terrible choice and you should go with bazzite.
I’m willing to troubleshoot infinitely over matrix for free and have 15 years of experience, feel free to message me!
Very helpful, thank you!
I would recommend endeavor os with plasma instead honestly. Its a similar setup, but you won’t have to deal with manjaro holding back updates.
Oh okay! Thanks, that’s helpful. So EndeavorOS has pretty frequent updates then? I’m ngl since switching I look forward to them, which is funny! It’s like “oh cool my computer got better and also new toys instead of worse and more bloated!”
Ahh I should’ve done this years ago but better late than never
Yeah, it should get updates exactly the same as arch. And I’m the same way, I check for update every time I log in lol. It does feel nice that you’re always up to date
Eh Arch can be quite stable if you’re careful, but it could also be a frustrating experience, there’s lots of manual configuration