A lot of the pressure is due to people transitioning to Mint from Win10 without understanding that they’re moving to an XWS system rather than Wayland. If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.
Seconding Artyom, Arch-based distros are virtually never a good idea for newbies. I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
But I’d also wager very few new Linux users would have any idea of what Wayland or X11 even are, let alone why they would pick one over the other. For them, Mint is still ideal.
I don’t generally recommend Silverblue or Bazzite to newbies, as there’s generally much less documentation and help if they run into problems, and if they ever need an app that isn’t flatpak’ed, it’d be very daunting and offputting for them to then figure out Distrobox or Toolbox to install it. Fine for more experienced folk, but at least until they become the default, I personally think it best to stick with regular Fedora or Mint, depending on the hardware requirements.
YouTube is full of Bazzite tutorials. Whatever is out there at documentation is also quite recent. When people ask ChatGPT about how to do something on Ubuntu or Mint, the answers are generated from 15 years old forum posts. Often not only unusable but also damaging. My expectationnis that for immutable distributions LLM answers in 15 years will not break the OS. At worst it’ll recommend some tool deleted from Flathub and it’ll merely not work instead of breaking everything.
A lot of the pressure is due to people transitioning to Mint from Win10 without understanding that they’re moving to an XWS system rather than Wayland. If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.
If you want Wayland and stability, use Bazzite.
Agree!
I’ve managed to convert three friends this last year. Two to Mint, one to Bazzite because he mostly games.
Immutable distro is perfect for him, just working out of the box.
Next «level» for him would probably be Fedora KDE Plasma, for sure not Arch.
Seconding Artyom, Arch-based distros are virtually never a good idea for newbies. I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
But I’d also wager very few new Linux users would have any idea of what Wayland or X11 even are, let alone why they would pick one over the other. For them, Mint is still ideal.
Bazzite is Fedora Silverblue with a bunch of quality of life additions.
I don’t generally recommend Silverblue or Bazzite to newbies, as there’s generally much less documentation and help if they run into problems, and if they ever need an app that isn’t flatpak’ed, it’d be very daunting and offputting for them to then figure out Distrobox or Toolbox to install it. Fine for more experienced folk, but at least until they become the default, I personally think it best to stick with regular Fedora or Mint, depending on the hardware requirements.
YouTube is full of Bazzite tutorials. Whatever is out there at documentation is also quite recent. When people ask ChatGPT about how to do something on Ubuntu or Mint, the answers are generated from 15 years old forum posts. Often not only unusable but also damaging. My expectationnis that for immutable distributions LLM answers in 15 years will not break the OS. At worst it’ll recommend some tool deleted from Flathub and it’ll merely not work instead of breaking everything.
That’s a terrible recommendation for new users…
If all they want a computer for is Steam, they’re going to get a better experience on Wayland. Cinnamon is built on X.
That’s different than outright suggesting Arch.
But SteamOS is Arch? So why not suggest CachyOS, which is in a similar space?
No, it’s an immutable OS based on Arch. Also not rolling release.
You were also suggesting regular Arch and that’s irresponsible.