1w ago

Diving into daily driving Linux

I ended up with Nobara

As some of you already know I’ve been playing around on a small partition with Linux Mint. Learned basic troubleshooting and fixed some driver issues.

Now I’m very impressed with how it runs and decided to daily Linux and keep Windows for things Linux can’t do. Currently installing Windows on a new small SSD as we speak. (240Gb for the OS plus it’s gonna get a 500GB NTFS partition on my 2TB gaming drive)

This brings me to my question. Which Distro? I’ve narrowed it down to keep using Mint or Fedora KDE Plasma 41. Mint is something I’ve already screwed around with and there’s loads of guides online about it.

But Fedora seems like a better for for me. I’m not afraid of tinkering at all. But as long as I came game and daily it for browsing, emails etc. without too much issues, I’m good.

What’s the consensus? Setting it up tonight after my new W11 install is up and running.

58 comments

You're going to get a hundred different answers about distros. There are a lot of knowledgeable people who forget what the beginner experience is like.
Mint is universally recommended and well loved. It works well and you can't go wrong. It uses Cinammon desktop environment and I wanted KDE so I didn't go for it.
Fredora is also top tier and again you can't go wrong. This comes in many flavours (including Bazzite which is an immutable Fedora distro pre-set towards gaming, or Nobara).
When you're wiping your drive anyway and setting up new and fresh, then this is the best time to install different distros and test drive them for a few hours/days. Ultimately this is not a life changing decision; and your choice can always be changed later.
I personally did all this a year ago and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been great and this distro doesn't get recommended enough. The desktop environment will be your daily use experience. The underlying distro will be your mechanics under the hood. I would suggest you pick something "beginner friendly" unless you really want to take on a steeper learning curve.
- OpenSUSE is awesome, they're undergoing a restructuring and rebranding right now. Which means that promotion of use and updates could be slow or even pause. They were asked to return to the community for a new governance model. They should emerge the other side with a different name and branding, as SUSE asked them to stop using the name. It's a transition time for the distro.
- Mints outdated drivers can definitely cause issues for beginners.
  
  It did definitely do that for me. Tried that and Pop.
  Luckily this community helped me figure it out together with information found searching the web. If I wasn’t persistent and somewhat tech savvy I’d be stuck for sure.
  
  I've been using Mint for a while now, Haven't had any issues so far. What issues did you have?

If you are going to game daily, I would recommend Nobara. Which is based on Fedora, but has all the gaming stuff precompiled/installed and ready to go from the start, Which makes getting started with gaming much easier. Its very user friendly to boot.
but if you just want an binary answer between Mint or Fedora, I'd say Fedora.. since you will still be able to find, install, and benefit from a lot of the Nobara stuff, even if its not included in the box from the start.
- Nobara is actually one I highly considered. But I keep reading that base Fedora is more stable.
  Of that’s not true I love the features Nobara comes with.
  
  It's more stable. But as I understand, it doesn't come with any proprietary drivers or blobs, so you've got to do an amount of tinkering and configuring to get it running for gaming. Especially if you've got Nvidia GPU.
  Whereas with nobara or bazzite, those features are baked in already, by professionals.
  You need them either way, so my question is, who do you trust more? Yourself? Or the developers behind the gaming oriented flavors of Fedora?
  I went with Bluefin, based on silverblue, based on Fedora. It has all the gaming stuff I need, plus like bazzite, it's immutable (ish), so while it's harder to do some stuff the normal Linux way, it's also significantly more stable, because nothing I do or install ever touches the core operating system files. I can't break anything, and this makes me happy 😁
  
  Stability is a trap. It sounds automatically appealing but is so much more trouble it's worth for the benefits it provides, especially for a daily driver system intended for gaming, not a long-forgotten server running in a closet that's been doing the exact same thing for 20 years. The gaming ecosystem is not stable, new games are released constantly, new clients are released constantly, new updates and DLC are released constantly, new drivers are released constantly. You have no choice but to keep up and if your OS is not keeping up because it's "stable" you're in for a world of pain.
  If you try to use a stable OS for an unstable goal you'll be fighting it all the time, ironically things will be broken far more often than any "unstable" equivalent, because you won't be able to get the latest rapid updates you need when you need them. To get things to work you'll have to force different updates into place one by one, piece by piece, then future updates will get broken because you'll end up with two copies of things that are conflicting one of which got manually installed.
  Stable distros absolutely have their place, there's nothing wrong with them and they're typically the most used and popular distros because they are ridiculously good at doing what they're designed to do. But playing games on your desktop is not what they're designed to do.
  
  I mean, base Fedora probably is more stable.
  Playing games requires an lot of extra stuff, and the kernal is more bleeding edge in nobara to keep those GPU updates (if AMD) and performance tweaks fresh and useful.
  but generally speaking from my experience, Nobara is no more or less stable than anything else, windows or linux. And any issue I did rarely had was typically resolved with a reboot, and generally from a game.
- Any reason to go with Nobara over Bazzite?
  
  Nobara is not immutable, which is a plus for some people. I'd use it over Bazzite because I like the ability to fix things that break rather than just rolling back to an older image and hoping that the next update unfucks whatever the maintainers broke in the last update, but some people are fine with that process, so for them there is Bazzite.
  
  I have never used bazzite to give you an honest answer to that.
  all I can say is that I was distro hopping for a good while after running into roadblocks on ubuntu, and Nobara is just where everything clicked into place with usability, and ease of gaming.
- seconding Nobara, I've been using it daily for close to two years now and have been super happy with it.

Another vote for fedora here.
I use regular workstation. I like gnome so that fits. And I found when I set up arch exactly the way I liked, I was just recreating the fedora experience ;)
It’s not bleeding edge but I don’t think anyone really needs that unless you just bought a brand new vid card or mobo etc. If your components are common and 6mo+ old fedora is new enough.
I really don’t have issues with it. It seems to have become the new Ubuntu (install it and it just works).

Most of distros use the same projects code-wise, some just add some patches or lag months behind. I mean, it doesn't really matter, just do it. You'll either be happy with anything or outgrow whatever you pick up now. And either sooner or later land using one that you will decide is absolutely the best, or just have vague preferences in the end
But it's the journey that does it, not a particular distro
- I like this answer!

I'm sure Mint is fine but it's hideous so I've never touched it.
Bazzite comes with a whole lot of stuff out of the box that makes the Linux experience so much easier, and the gaming experience so much better, so that's what I usually recommend.

As a long term Linux user I highly recommend the Universal Blue (immutable Fedora) spins. It's been rock solid on my desktop and 10x better on a laptop I thought was a lemon because Ubuntu would crash or do other weird things about once a week. The immutableness hasn't really caused me a lot of grief except when I tried to connect my 15yo printer (I just relented and got a new printer) when I had to go through a distrobox.
- Specifically, Bazzite uses these and I have been really impressed since switching my daily driver from manjaro to bazzite.
  Bazzite also ships with a lot of gaming software and tweaks/fixes preconfigured which is nice if that is important to you.
- Only issue with uBlue distros is the lack of documentation and limited help resources (many questions in the forum are left unanswered, as the uBlue team is quite small and likely can't get to them all).

I find endeavor really simple. All the goodness of arch and it just works??? with AUR? Woah! I think you are better off choosing a desktop environmental. That really changes the experience rather than the distro. I am a big time KDE fangirl myself and will thrive on any distro with KdE Plasma on.
- Ended up going with Nobara KDE. So far just about everything I've tried to do just worked flawlessly.
  
  That is what I started with! Later I found it too unstable and caved in for endeavour. but hey enjoy, I had a great time with it.
  
  Why not stay with Nobara KDE? Its nice to have gaming configured out of the box.

Hah. I just went with Fedora on a new build, got all the way to setting up all the stuff I need that computer to do and found that it seems the power management is borked and sometimes it just decides to die on a black screen after being left unattended for no discernible reason.
That doesn't mean anything to you, but I wanted to whine in public about it. If you want to factor in my specific set of bugs feel free to do so, though.
- Well, I'm grateful for your complaints for off topic reasons. To bring it back to the thread, I recently built a living room gaming PC with the 9070XT and have been really pleased with EndeavourOS having easy access to the latest packages (like Meta 25) to be able to run brand new hardware.
  I just ordered a Framework 13 and my natural choice of distro was Endeavour again. You made me realise I have absolutely no idea how I would approach power management, so maybe I'll start off with an officially supported options whilst researching things like kernel tweaks, tools, etc that could help. Ironically, the officially supported distros include Fedora lol!
  
  My PC is made from scraps and some of the hardware isn't that standard. At the same time it's not new, so I'm not giving Fedora a pass, either. It was not waking up from sleep, getting stuck on some power settings, not taking modifications through the GUI and other stuff. I think I have it working now, we'll see.
  That was on my third attempt, too. I really don't like distro hopping.

Fedora is a safe bet. Kinoite is their atomic distro and bazzite is a fork of that as well as steamOS which is great for gaming.

In my experience, Ubuntu and Ubuntu variants make for a great daily driver for someone who is new to Linux. When I started to get into Linux, I just found the most Q&A content and support for Ubuntu as I googled my way through it. This plentiful support was specifically geared towards newcomers, which I felt the other Linux communities lacked in comparison.

I'm doing the same thing. Someone recommended Bazzite to me and it seems to come with a lot of the compatibility stuff ready to go. I haven't really gotten into it much but my plan is to dip my toes in with it and at least learn the names of the apps and what they do. After that If I want to switch I hope it will be easier. The biggest hurdle for me is just knowing what's what.
I do love the file browser on it already. I'm doing the same stuff with it I had to install 2 3rd party apps in Windows for.
- Bazzite is definitely a good choice for a PC that you'll use like a console. But because it's an atomic OS (immutable) downloading less popular apps may be a bit annoying. It's not impossible but just keep that in mind if you ever get frustrated. If an immutable OS isn't working for you, then id give Nobara OS a try.
  
  I'll keep that in mind. So far haven't hit any walls other than FreeCAD running like ass but I'm not sure that's Bazzite's problem or something else. Still digging into it.

That's the wonderful thing about distros, you can keep trying different ones until you find one you love or just get tired of changing lol.
- I absolutely despise installing Windows. Takes forever.
  Linux distros take like 10 minutes. I love it!
  
  And you don't have to fuck with drivers, especially for basic shit like the friggin hard drive. No forced accounts either!
- Why though?
  
  Sometimes you mess up an install, sometimes you just want to try different things and see what's out there. I had to do that a bit to get a sense of what kind of distros I like and don't like.

Of those two, I think Fedora is the better choice since the packages are more up to date. Fedora with Plasma is a great choice anyway. It's also a large distro with lots of online support. Try it out!

I use zorin. I can use it right away after I install for most things and over time I have added a few things. I do find the gui software interface annoying (its an ubuntu spin so same as ubuntu) so either download the ubuntu option for things on the web so it is just like installing with windows or I do apt at the command line. Its good for running windows software but not necessarily gaming as it is by no means bleeding edge. So its all about stability and out of box usage that gives you an interface that is very windows like.

I wouldn't recommend Mint if you plan on gaming on it all. It has of lot of older packages from what I've heard.
Bazzite and CachyOS are also worth looking into

the simplest answer would be: just try them all by yourself and see which one fits. Try only the popular ones btw, otherwise you'd have a hard time finding supports.
Word of advice: dont mind the aesthetics, but pay attention to stuff like package managers / packages and community. Here is what I meant:
Unless you have special flavor from a distro like XFCE from Manjaro, any Linux distro can be made pretty. I can have Debian 12 on one computer and something like Arch on another, and I can still make both look exactly the same. So dont choose a distro just because it looks pretty, you can do that with any of them.
Packages and package managers are so important, those are how you get software on Linux. Debian has a lot of softwares in its repos. Arch's main repos do not have as much, but its AUR repos allow a lot of softwares to be installed.
Do you like apt, the manager for Ubuntu/Debian? Or do you prefer dnf, the manager for Fedora and RHEL? Package managers are more of a style really. I like Fedora's dnf but Arch's pacman is way faster.
Community is also important. You dont want to pick a distro where only a handful of ppl use it. It would be very difficult to get supports. Ubuntu / Mint / Debians are so popular that you can get answers from any forum.

Win11 is a better daily driver than any Linux system. (If it was different, I'd probly start hating Linux too.) Win11 HyperV is a well developed virtualization system. Run a VM if you need Linux. There's also the M$ linux-on-windows thing, but I don't enjoy having the OS and the guest mix like that, so a VM is best for me.

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