Arch is like making your own cookies, starting from growing the wheat.
Mint and Pop! are like buying Oreos.
I’m done threshing in my life, never again.
Arch is like making your own cookies, starting from growing the wheat.
This is really more like LFS. Arch would be having all the ingredients and doing the baking.
I think LFS means you also need to build the stove.
LFS: Here’s an empty planet and a bunch of minerals and shit, bake a cake.
If you wish to
make an apple piecompile Linux from scratch, you must first invent the universe-Carl Sagan
I agree. and I happen to enjoy baking. arch was my first distro and after a whirlwind tour of other options at some point, has remained my daily driver os for the better part of a decade.
i don’t suggest arch to just any newbies. I suggest it to the ones who are overtly interested in baking. I don’t suggest it to people asking the best way to get tasty cookies, who are perhaps the majority, but not by as much as people seem to naturally suspect. sometimes I think some people giving answers don’t remember or realize that there are many kinds of people interested in learning about Linux and therefore many right answers for a starting distro.
For the new readers never heard of LFS : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_From_Scratch
Arch would be having all the ingredients and doing the baking.
After being forced to watch a 3 hour documentary.
I like Oreos.
And not at all sarcastically, mint Oreos.
ChOcoLaTE tOotHpAstE
mint has the same problem that butyric acid has in american herseys chocolate. if you associate the ingredient with toothpaste/vomit first, then you come in with a much more negative view of it.
Hershey’s chocolate is gross though.
Goddamit, now you made me buy and try out mint oreos for the first time.
They’re one of my many one weaknesses
Right up there with table legs in the dark and white cheddar cheezits
Make sure to have a glass of milk with them!GUZZLE MILK WHILE YOU EAT THEM.
Edit: I sounded too much like an ad.
Mint Oreos are good, but lemon Oreos are great
Damn you and your mouth-watering memory inducers!
I had a phase of making shakes with milk + mint oreos + mint ice cream
Arch has an installer script now. It’s literally 1 command and you get a fully working system
You maybe get a working system. archinstall is nowhere near foolproof or even complete.
If you want a really painless install of something that gets you the closest to Arch use Endeavour.
So? You can install Windows with 0 commands
Doesn’t mean it is setup how you like it
Arch beat the wheat
Alright so I got a steam deck and that seems cool. Windows has sucked for awhile and now it blows too so can I just install the steamdeck’s version of linux on my PCs too? Or do I choose a different distro? Or uhhhhhhhhhhhh wtf do I do I just wanna play games without being spied on and advertised at
Other comment made great points on MintOS and PopOS for beginning a Linux journey.
SteamOS isn’t available for a full PC release (that I am aware of), but Bazzite was made to be a full-distro alternative to SteamOS. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it has good reception from what I see.
Linux Mint is very easy to pick up, though, and I highly recommend for someone coming from Windows. It is fully functional through GUI and has several different flavors for the desktop environment. I’m a fan of KDE, but Cinnemon was also very nice. A version of KDE Plasma is what SteamOS 3.0 uses. I’m not as big of a fan of GNOME, but a lot of people love it as a mor elegant, modern desktop environment.
Bazzite is pretty good, as are Nobara and ChimeraOS. I’ve got HoloISO (SteamOS reimplementation) running and it’s pretty ok. It does what I need but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it due to the Bluetooth issues I’ve had and the on again/off again support.
Funny enough, instead of fixing the Bluetooth issues I just wrote a script a week or two ago that runs on startup. It removes btusb and btintel then reloads them. I hate janky fixes like that but I don’t have the time or energy to tinker with operating systems anymore.
Awesome, thanks! I have some homework to do looking into these now, so many options!
MintLinux and Pop!OS are normally the two front-runners for new users. Basically, if you use Steam and you don’t play online-only games with bad implementations of anti-cheat software, you are good to game on either.
Make a USB that you can “live boot” from, so you can test out how they work with your hardware before you actually install the OS. Generally speaking, Mint works better with AMD, and Pop! works better with Nvidia.
Here’s the official basic guide for Mint:
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/And here’s the official basic guide for Pop!:
https://support.system76.com/articles/install-pop/Awesome, thanks for the guide links, definitely bookmarking this whole post haha. The Nvidia vs AMD thing is good to know too, I scored a great deal a few years back on a RTX card and I really want that thing working properly if possible
It’s only a general rule. In my experience, Nvidia has kinda been all over the place on how Linux-friendly they are. Do a couple searches on the exact card you have, you might be lucky.
I hope you have fun with finding what works best for you and your hardware!
Fair enough, and that is a bit of my concern, Nvidia doesn’t seem to be associated with being Linux friendly. Thanks for the advice, I wouldnt have thought to search on the specific card. This is gonna take some experimenting I think
Don’t know how it’s going to go for you, but Mint has been going really well for me gaming-wise on an Alienware with Nvidia RTX. Pretty much all the Steam games I care about work, and all my Blizzard games through Lutris. All through simple GUIs, and if you like the Windows feel and setup, there’s a Windows 10 theme you can try out, and tutorials on how to get a Windows style mouse cursor too. Again - all up to you, but it worked really well for me and is amazingly customizable. Just… remember to do Timeshift backups regularly, just in case. You never know if you’ll need one.
