I’ve played with Linux before and finally had enough with Windows. I’m a seasoned programmer but mainly concerned with gaming for this computer, except that I want to be able to run Unreal Engine 5 and potentially other big tools like that. TIA 💓
CachyOS has been very good for me for a similar purpose
there’s basically two types of dudes (gender not inferred): the ones that faced with a problem go “hmm, that’s interesting. let’s try…” regardless if it’s a lazy afternoon or they’re under heavy artillery fire… and then there are those that invariably go “oh what the fuck now!?”
if you’re in the latter camp, you have one option and that’s Ubuntu. for an experienced user it does suck in some ways, but it “just works” in so many others. you will have ample challenges making the transition and you don’t need additional ones.
when you’ve been around the block a few times, survived a crash or two, know what’s what and have at least a passable understanding of the OS, then you can travel farther and explore options, as your switching costs to something like Fedora WS are essentially zero and 99% of what you learned applies.
but, right now, you can stop looking - this is your only option.
Mint is Ubuntu-based and I find it very natural to transition to from Windows. More natural than Ubuntu, despite me being slightly more familiar with Ubuntu from work.
I’ve never found it to suck, but I don’t get on my computer to fuck around with the OS and make things just exactly the way I like them. I automate some scripts to save myself typing for things I commonly do, and I do gaming, browsing, and development. I’ve yet to find Mint wanting. It makes more sense to me than macOS.
here’s why you’re doing beginners a disservice with Mint.
it’s an X11 distro. no big deal if you’re installing it on a 10-year old optiplex with a 1080p monitor, works same as wayland on that setup.
if it’s a laptop, you get shitty scaling and hidpi support. worse touchpad gestures. dock/undock issues with multiple displays, not to mention - more scaling issues. even if there is some feature parity with a modern Gnome/Plasma desktop, the predominant development effort isn’t in Cinnamon’s camp.
if it’s a modern desktop you also face issues with spotty support as Mint lags with kernel versions. finally if you got both, muscle memory is a problem if you got Cinnamon/X on desktop and Gnome/Wayland on laptop.
if you’re an experienced user, yes, I am sure you can make it work. for a beginner, we need an onboarding path with the least possible issues and when there are any, ample documentation on how to fix it.
I’ll keep these thoughts in mind for the future. I’ve yet to try Linux on a laptop in any capacity and some of those concerns are not anything I’ve had to give thought to. I do use a pair of UHD monitors but not noticed lack of scaling supposty but that could be because they are the same DPI or maybe I’m just so used to scaling issues in every other OS I’ve internalized them.
Ubuntu isn’t bad by any means, Mint just feels more comfortable to me. I really should experiment with some other distros but as I said I don’t turn on my computer to fuck with things that are working for me. Most of my experience with anything but Ubuntu and Mint is two decades ago.
I don’t really get the whole Wayland vs X11 but I think I did try installing Wayland on Ubuntu once and it was… unfamiliar. I was troubleshooting an issue that turned out to be a bad ram stick and it left me with a negative impression of just about everything I tried because everything would crash so damn often (go figure), so I probably need to try that stuff again.
I did install /home to a separate partition to make distro hopping easier and then just… never did.
Same boat - i found popOS the right fit für me, the thinkpad just humms along, even with firmware updates
I personally use Nobara for gaming and streaming. I don’t remember why I ended up going with Nobara over Bazzite, but I love it!
when I was in uni like 5 years ago I put arch on the school provided laptop. Not saying to use arch but iirc I had to compile ue4 for Linux because a pre compiled binary wasn’t available. It had issues compared to windows.
The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.
It’s possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it’s nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).
If you don’t mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engineI tinkered a bit with linux before and dual-booted for about 3 months before I switched entirely to linux about a year ago now. I used this “grace period” to get more familiar, set up everything like i wanted it, and just tested some stuff.
After using Mint before I settled for EndeavourOS. It’s based on Arch. As a rolling release OS I find it interesting for gaming and getting recent updates that are not entirely bleeding edge. There were some learning and even issues in the beginning concerning nvidia GPUs but I didn’t have any major issues for months now. The only major issue I had was cause by my own stupidity but also could be fixed using chroot.