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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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.
I feel like just getting Fedora KDE would be fine. Maybe I will try Bazzite first and see if the atomic-ness is too limiting.
Fine but still a downgrade to reliability
I use both Mint and Nobara. Nobara is on my gaming rig, and Mint is my daily driver laptop. I agree that KDE is better than Cinnamon, but I do feel like Cinnamon is more streamlined for folks who don't want/need all the bells and whistles that come with KDE.
Also, I read somewhere that full support for Wayland on Cinnamon is slated for this year.
I haven't used Bazzite, but comparing against Nobara, Mint's updater and graphical software store are way more polished.
Also, every once in a while, I find that some application that I need is only distributed as a .deb (such as the AWS VPN Client), so it's nice to be on a Debian-family distro when that situation arises.
Immutability is a double edged sword. I bricked my drive permissions trying to get Bazzite to let me change my login screen background. Everyone assumes that immutability will prevent these sort of things, but for me, switching to a non immutable distro (Garuda) meant I didn't have to muck about in the more touchy settings because I didn't have to fight the restrictions in the OS anymore.
Right click image > set as wallpaper > both
It would be nice if it were that easy, but the login screen settings are in the immutable portion.
I don't care anymore though, I switched to Garuda and everything works as expected out of the box.
That's just not true I did it with this method on a clients computer three days ago.
Great, maybe they fixed it. Still don't care because I moved on to a great system a few years ago where that didn't need to be fixed.
Right but if the issues are fixed then immutable is the right choice for beginners.
maybe it was a double edged sword years ago.
Look, I'm not going to study immutable systems for other potential problems just to argue with you. I'm just pointing out that sometimes you can't predict what will cause a problem for someone and there are other easy to use options out there, so people can make well-informed decisions.
I'm sure Bazzite is great, I liked it well enough while I was using it, but it wasn't until after I switched to something else that Linux started making sense to me. Bazzite may be harder to break, but for me as a Linux newbie, it wasn't "better" and it felt weird to use in a way Garuda never did.
There are countless documented issues that are fundamental to non-immutable systems, your example is both not a fundamental issue with a design and has been fixed. It's not good info.
Whether you like it or not, "I had trouble with that distro but not this other" is always valid info.
whether you like it or not that's simply false, when the issue has been long resolved it stops being of any real value and actually becomes misleading. If any issues I report are not current I no longer say them unless I'm trying to make a point about the competency of the distro, however, that point wouldn't be valid in your case because immutables were in their infancy until relatively recently.
if I reported that I had issues with adobe flash player on fedora in 2009 it would not be useful info to anyone now, similarly.
furthermore that's not even considering if it was caused by hardware or cosmic rays, if the issue cannot be reproduced it's likely misinformation.
so no, it simply is not the case that all reports are valid or contain useful information for making a decision, in your case it's quite the opposite.
I think you're overthinking it.
I think you're underthinking it.
Clearly.
Overthinking implies an issue with the thought process, can you point to one?
Other than the fact that you are investing way too much time on the opinion of one random person on the Internet...
The easiest thing to point to is that systems are complex. While you are attributing the problem I had to specific programming which may have been changed, the fact is that it could easily be a symptom of a completely different problem. Overlooking common needs? Behind on updates? Accidentally breaking things in the software?
Trying to account for and analyze everything can be a mental trap.
Sometimes you just have to say "ok, that's a data point" and see if of indicates a trend without getting dragged into the black hole of trying to account for everything and resolve it.
I don't care if my leaving Bazzite was justified or premature, the important data point is that it doesn't work for all beginners. Bazzite didn't feel right to me, it felt awkward and forced in a way Garuda never did.
Pointing out that they may have fixed a problem doesn't undo the experience I had. Proving they fixed something specific doesn't undo that problems can and do exist.
I am happy if others love Bazzite, out want great for this beginner.
it's an invalid data point. If you have some other issues post about it but that isn't good data, garbage in garbage out