A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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 or aurora if you don’t like gaming is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let 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, lxqt 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.
Agree Mint is not the best option, in a big part because of their refusal to embrace QT and KDE, but I don’t think every newbie needs immutability.
We often assume Linux newbies to be a bit of a grandma-style user - just browse, work with docs and play games from time to time.
But people coming to Linux are no average demographic - they are often enthusiastic about their computers and advanced use cases, and that’s when they will get stuck with immutables because things work different there. Some things are different, some are harder, and some are pretty much impossible to do. Tinkering is complicated compared to traditional distros. Besides, it will always feel limiting, even if it directs you towards the best practices.
I like the way things are organized in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - it’s a regular mutable rolling release distribution, yet, thanks to snapper being beautifully configured out of the box, you can be sure you can revert nearly everything. Big changes, like initiating an update, automatically trigger snapshots of all system and program files, and they are available from GRUB, so you can always revert with ease. To me, it’s a very healthy compromise between ability to tinker and safety of the system.
Unfortunately, however, Tumbleweed does little to appeal to newbie users. Sure, it has some graphical tools (take YaST), but they are severely outdated and don’t explain much to the user, some updates require nuances Discover cannot work with, prompting the user to go with command-line tools, etc. I would love for something to emerge that would be similar in philosophy to Tumbleweed, but more newbie-friendly.
Also, love Flatpaks and install them whenever I can. Saves so much trouble.
Last time I touched immutables I couldn’t run software for censorship-resistant VPNs. Regular services are all blocked in my area (even more sophisticated ones like Mullvad and onion-routed Proton tunnels), so it takes a more involved software that doesn’t work on immutables. That was a dealbreaker for me personally.
Besides, some things work better as native packages, not Flatpaks or Distroboxes. Wine is a simple example - sure, you can use Flatpaks like Bottles or Lutris or PortProton, but if you just want Wine without bells and whistles, native packet works much better than Flatpak.
Interesringly, ostree didn’t solve the VPN issue for me, and for others too. Works fine on all mutable distros I tried, though (including regular Fedora editions).
Can’t remember how it went with Wine. Besides, as far as I remember, installing native packets via ostree drastically increases update size and adds extra entries to manage, putting a limit on how much stuff you can reasonably install this way.
With that, I figured I’d rather take mutable system and apply good practices to it whenever possible. Snapshots? Check. Flatpaks? Always preferred. Sane management for native app repos? Yes. And with that, I never had my system fail me.
My use case can be a bit rare and specific, but there are plenty of different ones out there, and there’s nothing more frustrating than figuring out your distro doesn’t work with thing X and nothing can be done about it.
Immutable distros are cool, and hopefully it will all get resolved in a sane way. But to me, we’re not there yet.
I’ll uh, I’ll take you up on that matrix add. My system is solid right now, but it’d be nice to have that option in my back pocket should I get stuck on something 😬
Edit: additionally, I agree wholeheartedly that immutable is the way forward for newbies in Linux, and honestly maybe even a power users workstation that needs maximum uptime/reliability.
I’ve been fiddling with Linux for over 20 years myself, but never INTENSELY, if that makes sense. I’d tinker with it on an old PC, dual boot my main PC, break it, go back to Windows for a year or two, tinker again, go fully Linux for a year, break it, back to Windows, etc etc.
I’ve been running Bluefin for almost a year, and I guarantee you it’s gonna stick this time. It’s so good, covers almost all my needs, and now I can’t break it!
My experience with KDE is that it is a frustrating new user experience. I also doubt that the devs have tried setting up their desktop from defaults recently.
Kwallet (one of the two reasons I stopped using KDE):
Kwallets defaults are bad. They encourage you down an opaque path that requires CLI intervention. If you stubbornly take that path the performance of kwallet is painfully bad. Any electron app (discord, etc.) will now hang unresponsive on the main UI thread for 1 to 3 minutes if kwallet was not already open. None of these apps need kwallet. Chromium stalls in the same way on startup except that if you don’t want to open the wallet it will keep asking 3-4 times taking minutes to reach the prompt each time and won’t unblock the main UI thread until you either enter the password or it crashes with an error that too many wallet requests were issued. Protonvpn won’t open on KDE unless a wallet is configured and unlocked. The password prompt has a time out for no cryptographically good reason which means if you try to open the wallet and then wind up distracted by something else you may time out and need to restart the waiting game from square one. Bugs have been open against kwallet for years. Allegedly they have been fixed and I have updated but the speed is still awful on my computer.
Fractional scaling:
Nominally KDE does this the “right” way but practically application support seems somewhat absent. The flagship Linux office product, Libre Office, displays microscopically on one monitor with fractional scaling on. It just works on other DEs
Borderless fullscreen with mouse capture on multiple monitors is broken and results in the mouse wandering off and going MIA in FPS style games. KDE killed me in Helldivers several times before I switched windowing modes. Honestly minor except that it seems to be the default in gaming distros where this matters
Other DE issues:
Cinnamon freezes on haswell age Intel iGPs
XFCE handles cheap Chinese graphics tablets badly
XFCE fractional scaling is confusing and requires updating too many settings. The flip side of this is it can run fractional scaling much more performantly than other DEs under x11 on lousy iGPs. The problem here is not that the scaling controls are inverted but that the graphics scale settings are scattered all over the place.
All in all I would say that Cinnamon is a lot less frustrating at an entry level than KDE on recent hardware.
Do you have the issue tracker for kwallets issues? This is my first time hearing of these. Out of all the people I have given this to not one has had any complaints with kwallet, it’s possible these issues were resolved, although none of my users were using vpn’s.
libreoffice uses xwayland, so that’s really on them to fix and there are simple workarounds.
both of which are pretty quick fixes, kwallet can be replaced and the libreoffice issue is a toggle in the settings. I usually set people up and make sure they can do everything they need to, these issues seem very minor compared to the issues with cinnamon
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, 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 or aurora if you don’t like gaming is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let 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, lxqt 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.
The thing is you are actually thinking about it and stating facts instead of just repeating what everybody is saying.
Agree Mint is not the best option, in a big part because of their refusal to embrace QT and KDE, but I don’t think every newbie needs immutability.
We often assume Linux newbies to be a bit of a grandma-style user - just browse, work with docs and play games from time to time.
But people coming to Linux are no average demographic - they are often enthusiastic about their computers and advanced use cases, and that’s when they will get stuck with immutables because things work different there. Some things are different, some are harder, and some are pretty much impossible to do. Tinkering is complicated compared to traditional distros. Besides, it will always feel limiting, even if it directs you towards the best practices.
I like the way things are organized in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - it’s a regular mutable rolling release distribution, yet, thanks to snapper being beautifully configured out of the box, you can be sure you can revert nearly everything. Big changes, like initiating an update, automatically trigger snapshots of all system and program files, and they are available from GRUB, so you can always revert with ease. To me, it’s a very healthy compromise between ability to tinker and safety of the system.
Unfortunately, however, Tumbleweed does little to appeal to newbie users. Sure, it has some graphical tools (take YaST), but they are severely outdated and don’t explain much to the user, some updates require nuances Discover cannot work with, prompting the user to go with command-line tools, etc. I would love for something to emerge that would be similar in philosophy to Tumbleweed, but more newbie-friendly.
Also, love Flatpaks and install them whenever I can. Saves so much trouble.
What exactly is harder or impossible to do with immutables? As far as I am aware it is basically all upsides and no downsides honestly.
Last time I touched immutables I couldn’t run software for censorship-resistant VPNs. Regular services are all blocked in my area (even more sophisticated ones like Mullvad and onion-routed Proton tunnels), so it takes a more involved software that doesn’t work on immutables. That was a dealbreaker for me personally.
Besides, some things work better as native packages, not Flatpaks or Distroboxes. Wine is a simple example - sure, you can use Flatpaks like Bottles or Lutris or PortProton, but if you just want Wine without bells and whistles, native packet works much better than Flatpak.
You could have used rpm-ostree for that. All of that, actually.
Interesringly, ostree didn’t solve the VPN issue for me, and for others too. Works fine on all mutable distros I tried, though (including regular Fedora editions).
Can’t remember how it went with Wine. Besides, as far as I remember, installing native packets via ostree drastically increases update size and adds extra entries to manage, putting a limit on how much stuff you can reasonably install this way.
With that, I figured I’d rather take mutable system and apply good practices to it whenever possible. Snapshots? Check. Flatpaks? Always preferred. Sane management for native app repos? Yes. And with that, I never had my system fail me.
My use case can be a bit rare and specific, but there are plenty of different ones out there, and there’s nothing more frustrating than figuring out your distro doesn’t work with thing X and nothing can be done about it.
Immutable distros are cool, and hopefully it will all get resolved in a sane way. But to me, we’re not there yet.
I’ll uh, I’ll take you up on that matrix add. My system is solid right now, but it’d be nice to have that option in my back pocket should I get stuck on something 😬
Edit: additionally, I agree wholeheartedly that immutable is the way forward for newbies in Linux, and honestly maybe even a power users workstation that needs maximum uptime/reliability.
I’ve been fiddling with Linux for over 20 years myself, but never INTENSELY, if that makes sense. I’d tinker with it on an old PC, dual boot my main PC, break it, go back to Windows for a year or two, tinker again, go fully Linux for a year, break it, back to Windows, etc etc.
I’ve been running Bluefin for almost a year, and I guarantee you it’s gonna stick this time. It’s so good, covers almost all my needs, and now I can’t break it!
Feel free to send me a message:
@communist:4d2.org
My experience with KDE is that it is a frustrating new user experience. I also doubt that the devs have tried setting up their desktop from defaults recently.
Kwallet (one of the two reasons I stopped using KDE): Kwallets defaults are bad. They encourage you down an opaque path that requires CLI intervention. If you stubbornly take that path the performance of kwallet is painfully bad. Any electron app (discord, etc.) will now hang unresponsive on the main UI thread for 1 to 3 minutes if kwallet was not already open. None of these apps need kwallet. Chromium stalls in the same way on startup except that if you don’t want to open the wallet it will keep asking 3-4 times taking minutes to reach the prompt each time and won’t unblock the main UI thread until you either enter the password or it crashes with an error that too many wallet requests were issued. Protonvpn won’t open on KDE unless a wallet is configured and unlocked. The password prompt has a time out for no cryptographically good reason which means if you try to open the wallet and then wind up distracted by something else you may time out and need to restart the waiting game from square one. Bugs have been open against kwallet for years. Allegedly they have been fixed and I have updated but the speed is still awful on my computer.
Fractional scaling: Nominally KDE does this the “right” way but practically application support seems somewhat absent. The flagship Linux office product, Libre Office, displays microscopically on one monitor with fractional scaling on. It just works on other DEs
Borderless fullscreen with mouse capture on multiple monitors is broken and results in the mouse wandering off and going MIA in FPS style games. KDE killed me in Helldivers several times before I switched windowing modes. Honestly minor except that it seems to be the default in gaming distros where this matters
Other DE issues:
All in all I would say that Cinnamon is a lot less frustrating at an entry level than KDE on recent hardware.
Do you have the issue tracker for kwallets issues? This is my first time hearing of these. Out of all the people I have given this to not one has had any complaints with kwallet, it’s possible these issues were resolved, although none of my users were using vpn’s.
libreoffice uses xwayland, so that’s really on them to fix and there are simple workarounds.
both of which are pretty quick fixes, kwallet can be replaced and the libreoffice issue is a toggle in the settings. I usually set people up and make sure they can do everything they need to, these issues seem very minor compared to the issues with cinnamon