So, I was originally just going with Mint 22.1, but I’m getting a 9070xt and see mint is only on kernel 6.8 which doesn’t particularly support it?
Is using it still okay? Should I go with Bazzite instead? Or something else. I’m fine with a little amount of work to get shit working nice and all, I am fine with figuring out how to use the terminal if needed and all, just want something stable to play games and other shit on. Mint sounded good, but not if it won’t support my GPU.
While (I think) you can install HWE (hardware enablement) kernels on Mint, you would also have to upgrade Mesa, which is not as easy on Mint.
Personally in this case, for a truly stable distro, I’d install Debian Stable and install a backports kernel and backports Mesa, which are both currently versions that should support RDNA4 GPUs like OPs just fine. This involves two simple steps after installing:
- Enable the Debian Backports Repo (see https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/). It’s like, one file.
- Install the packages with something like
sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports linux-image-amd64 mesa-va-driversand reboot.
Before you take these steps, you probably won’t have hardware acceleration, but will still get video output so you can perform the steps and reboot.
This is definitely a weird suggestion, and other people’s suggestions might be less work out of the box. I just like Debian, and stability+backports+testing is part of what makes it possible for it to be my everything distro.
I’d personally recommend openSuse Tumbleweed if you are looking for the most up to date software with an easy setup. Been using it for a solid year now for gaming and general use with zero issues.
If you are looking for stability, and a strong gaming focus I would recommend Bazzite. Its stable, comes with everything basically game ready, and is pretty simple. It does come with the cost of less customization but it’s atomic nature makes it really hard to break. It’s solid for general use as well.
If you want to use newer hardware, and would rather not tinker with the system to get it working (and then have to maintain that tinkering yourself if something breaks later), Bazzite is probably the better option. It’s based on Fedora Atomic which is almost identical to rolling-release like Arch. I switched from Windows to Bazzite more than a year ago and have personally had no major issues, never had to mess with drivers or kernel updates due to the image-based system, and pretty much everything I might need for some workaround or another is included in the image. The community is very active on both the Discord and the web forum, and the documentation on the website is good as well, so there’s no shortage of help and available resources if you run into an issue or don’t know how to do something.
The main thing you need to be aware of going in is to be sure of which Desktop Environment you want (KDE or Gnome), because their user-space configs (which are not part of the image) interfere with each other so you can’t really switch between them without breaking a lot of things. Coming from Windows, I picked KDE and have been very happy with it.
Is there a particular difference between KDE and Gnome? I’ve mostly seen “KDE looks like windows and Gnome looks like mac” but are there major differences outside of looks I would need to worry about?
Check both out over at https://distrosea.com/ to see which you like more. Also different DEs come with different standard apps like which text editor or terminal they use. If you do not have a preference there, it shouldn’t matter much. Also you can switch those out if one in particular isn’t to your liking.
Get “live DVDs” for a distro that offers both GNOME and KDE (Fedora is a great one), and see which one you like best. Get a spare USB stick, install Ventoy on it, copy both ISOs across (a KDE one and a GNOME one), and try them out.
They’re mostly equivalent, but I think KDE has the edge when it comes to customization, included utilities, and advanced features. The Apple/Windows comparison is not limited to their look and feel, it also applies to the philosophical differences between the Gnome and KDE teams. If you plan to use SteamVR, KDE is supposedly better for that specific use case, but I can’t personally verify that.
The feature sets and quality of both DEs are constantly improving, so a comparison from 6 months or a year ago could already be outdated. I haven’t used Gnome in quite a few years, so I’m basing this entirely on what others have said about it.
Wayland support differs between their display managers (GDM and SDDM). Outside of that and a few other low levels things that you probably wouldn’t care about, it is mostly just flavoring.
And understand that its not a choice just between those two DEs. There are many others that you can use (ex. mate, cinnamon, etc), and even just window managers (ex. i3wm, hyprland, openbox, etc) you can mix and match with many other file managers,etc.
Thanks for bringing up the display managers and Wayland support, I don’t know enough to weigh in on those.
And understand that its not a choice just between those two DEs.
If OP sticks with Mint, that would be the case, but Bazzite only has two DEs right now (KDE and Gnome, with Budgie “coming soon”). OP doesn’t sound like they want to tinker much, they just want something that works with a modern GPU and will keep working. Bazzite certainly fits that use-case, at least in my experience.
That’s a fair point. Others could be installed via pacman or apt, but if the user is wanting out of the box, then that’s true. I think 6.8 does support 9070xt, but the safest and probably simplest opinion is Bazzite like you said.
Is there a particular reason you need an nvidia gpu? Like plans to do local LLMs or other projects that really require a nvidia gpu?
Because I am just so pleased with AMD for gpus in Linux. So simple.
Not knocking your choice, just trying to understand it. Everyone has valid reasons for why they choose their setups.
Edit: nevermind I am so confused by the new naming schemes I thought this was an nvidia, others have informed me its an AMD. Nevermind me I am a dingus.
9070xt is an AMD… it’s just new… and I’ve seen a lot of posts saying you want kernel 6.13 or higher for it, and mint 22 is using 6.8. (And that you want mesa 25 but I don’t think getting that’s an issue?)
(I realize AMD changing their naming yet again makes that confusing.)
So install the latest kernel into Mint ?
They said they’re getting a 9070xt - that is an AMD GPU.
Doesn’t Mint have newer kernel as well?
Arch or EndeavourOS (Arch for babies) should give you the best support for any new hardware.
You want a semi or rolling release distro. Fedora is semi-rolling, would be the most user-friendly I think. Anything Arch-based but more user-friendly, like CachyOS, would be good as well. Tim leweed is rarely recommended unless you need like bleeding edge, which it doesn’t sound like you really want.
I always go arch for stuff that needs the new shit, and debian for stuff that should run stable. Those nix bazzite tubleweed thingies are nice, but too niche, if you have a problem the small communities are less probable to have it as well and good luck finding solutions
Arch may be a little more than I would prefer because… just going to look at the site would take learning just what the fuck is going on. I don’t need constant crazy new stuff, I just want the GPU to work.
Bazzite is crazy simple and the forum on discourse is pretty active as well. Haven’t had many problems so far.
