I currently use Mint, as do several family members and friends. Its been nothing short of impeccable. I was occasionally tweaking things until now sometimes the game crashes, PC freezes requiring hard reset. Everything used to work pretty flawless out the box. Should I reinstall my mint or look at PopOS, Bazzite, Nobara, Etc? I’m at the point in my life. Where we all need something to just turn on and play. I want some shit that just works. Or reinstall mint but how without losing all my files and settings? and keep it moving as usual as it used to be flawless. Tweaking is fun until you tweaked so much shit breaks lol. I’m over tweaking. Just wanna game. I keep seeing immutable is good so that’s why I ask. Thanks!!
5600x 6700xt Its an all AMD build over here :)
Edit: You guys convinced me I’m booting it up now with KDE! I also plan to try PopOs. I’m excited. Thanks everyone!
I installed Bazzite about a week ago. Other then the Nvidia performance not being quite as fast and me not having figured out what I am going to use for design for 3D printing yet, my biggest problem has been that I can’t seem to get the setting for a custom login screen image to stick.
So all in all it’s been pretty painless.
My wallpaper and lock screens reset every time I restart. It borked my dual boot and now when I boot in the boot menu I have Fedora and Bazzite. No more windows. I still see it in the partition so I guess I just got to recover my windows. The install was a pain in the ass getting an error every time. So far on install I had to remove my old Linux mint EFI and rewrite a new one for bazzite. Gaming has worked no issues but its not been the smoothest transition. I kept getting an error code fatal error message. Had to terminal in to fix it before it would install. Had I known it was gonna be this much of an issue id have reinstalled mint which is a breeze just plug and click.
I unplugged the old drive and installed on a fresh one. I’d heard that dual boot installs could be finicky, so I just avoided it. Sorry it didn’t go smoothly for you.
Thanks. I actually played around on bazzite. I really like KDE and its the one thing I wish mint had, because it seems if you go tweaking too much icons and extensions in mint it gets buggy and shit stops working as smooth. But I got aggravated when I needed to create a bootable USB and couldn’t figure out how in bazzite. In mint you simply right click the file and click make bootable USB or whatever it says. I love mint. I reinstalled mint on a family members PC because they had my tweaked till I broke it copy. It just works out the box for all our games. Programs are easy to find and labelled so you know what they are unlike bazzite. Its much more refined and polished. Simple. LM for the win! Not knocking bazzite but it seems like a too new unrefined distro. IMO.
Bazzite if you want no bullshit easy mode and bulletproof.
Cachyos if you wanna tinker and squeeze out that last 10% in performance.
Not immutable, but I slapped Garuda on a 2016 gaming laptop to give it a second life and it’s been great for the most part. I got a bit fiddly with it and had to fight my way through some partial upgrade issues, but know I arch based distros better and it’s stable as can be. I honestly don’t update it that often since it just serves are my TV box, and I’m seriously considering swapping to a Nix install now that I’ve mostly stabilized my package list for the purposes of gaming and video encoding. Proton is one of the only things I think get regular updates on that device, but those are entirely handled by Steam, so immutable is very attractive to me for a gaming only system.
I’ll also add that my primary device has arch on it and I do most of my gaming (but also work) there. It’s great, and I can’t help but feel a lot of the distros that are “made for gaming” suffer from a lot of the issues that windows does. They are trying to be preconfigured to work with any and all hardware. This leads to bloated package lists, and just extra guffins to work around as you trouble shoot. I’d say my arch install took a bit longer to get gaming super stable, but I’ve also had to fix much fewer issues compared to the Garuda install.
All the people mentioning Bazzite are making me eye it to replace Garuda tho.
I adopted a lot of customisations from Garuda to my EndeavourOS setup. I got fed up with Garuda because it constantly broke.
Bootloader broke twice, desktop broke all the time, and when I needed to load a snapshot and it simply didn’t work, they finally lost me. Never had any of these issues with my current setup, really a surprising contrast, given that Endeavour is also Arch based.
I can’t recommend Garuda because they have somehow configured their sddm to not want to work with other desktop environments. Admin on the forums said it themselves. I’d recommend arcolinux because it doesn’t shove you into such restraints. Installation is a simple menu to install everything right away.
linux typically won’t hard freeze on errors like that no matter the distro. it can, but rarely. being an all amd build i suspect there’s some cpu bios feature auto scaling core clock or voltage and in my experience ryzen cpus need to have a manually set stable clock and voltage to perform properly no matter the os. try checking your bios and disabling any powersaving or auto-scaling features for your cpu and manually set it for stock clock and voltage. you may need to look up what these values are as the bios might not have a default value for you. this might not be your issue but it’s worth trying. good luck!
I tried out Bazzite on my Legion Go and was so impressed I immediately stopped distro hopping and installed it on my daily as well. Hardware wise everything works out of the box. It’s based on Fedora Kinoite so it’s quite well documented if you run into trouble or want to start doing weird shit. The few times I’ve had issues (mostly with flatpak sandboxing) they’ve been solvable with a quick web search.
