So, I was originally just going with Mint 22.1, but I’m getting a 9070xt and see mint is only on kernel 6.8 which doesn’t particularly support it?
Is using it still okay? Should I go with Bazzite instead? Or something else. I’m fine with a little amount of work to get shit working nice and all, I am fine with figuring out how to use the terminal if needed and all, just want something stable to play games and other shit on. Mint sounded good, but not if it won’t support my GPU.
If you want to use newer hardware, and would rather not tinker with the system to get it working (and then have to maintain that tinkering yourself if something breaks later), Bazzite is probably the better option. It’s based on Fedora Atomic which is almost identical to rolling-release like Arch. I switched from Windows to Bazzite more than a year ago and have personally had no major issues, never had to mess with drivers or kernel updates due to the image-based system, and pretty much everything I might need for some workaround or another is included in the image. The community is very active on both the Discord and the web forum, and the documentation on the website is good as well, so there’s no shortage of help and available resources if you run into an issue or don’t know how to do something.
The main thing you need to be aware of going in is to be sure of which Desktop Environment you want (KDE or Gnome), because their user-space configs (which are not part of the image) interfere with each other so you can’t really switch between them without breaking a lot of things. Coming from Windows, I picked KDE and have been very happy with it.
Is there a particular difference between KDE and Gnome? I’ve mostly seen “KDE looks like windows and Gnome looks like mac” but are there major differences outside of looks I would need to worry about?
KDE is better for GUI customization while Gnome is more plug and play IMO.
Check both out over at https://distrosea.com/ to see which you like more. Also different DEs come with different standard apps like which text editor or terminal they use. If you do not have a preference there, it shouldn’t matter much. Also you can switch those out if one in particular isn’t to your liking.
Get “live DVDs” for a distro that offers both GNOME and KDE (Fedora is a great one), and see which one you like best. “live” means it’s usable without installing anything, so it’s easy to try out. Get a spare USB stick, install Ventoy on it, copy both ISOs across (a KDE one and a GNOME one), and boot your computer from it to try them out.
Wayland support differs between their display managers (GDM and SDDM). Outside of that and a few other low levels things that you probably wouldn’t care about, it is mostly just flavoring.
And understand that its not a choice just between those two DEs. There are many others that you can use (ex. mate, cinnamon, etc), and even just window managers (ex. i3wm, hyprland, openbox, etc) you can mix and match with many other file managers,etc.
Thanks for bringing up the display managers and Wayland support, I don’t know enough to weigh in on those.
If OP sticks with Mint, that would be the case, but Bazzite only has two DEs right now (KDE and Gnome, with Budgie “coming soon”). OP doesn’t sound like they want to tinker much, they just want something that works with a modern GPU and will keep working. Bazzite certainly fits that use-case, at least in my experience.
That’s a fair point. Others could be installed via pacman or apt, but if the user is wanting out of the box, then that’s true. I think 6.8 does support 9070xt, but the safest and probably simplest opinion is Bazzite like you said.
I’m not super worried about out of the box, I’m fine with fucking around for set up a bit, just not looking for anything crazy like arch lol. From what I’ve seen it looks like either Fedora 42 or bazzite with KDE. Is there a decent site that shows off the different options for DE’s and windows managers where I could look through the differences? New to all of this.
Maybe something like Comparison, but you have to understand everything can be changed. So, Just because you have KDE, doesn’t mean you have to stick with Dolphin for files management, etc. Window managers are even more free form. You don’t get a file manager, or image viewer, or text editor. You get a window manager. You can use whatever you want to install though. You also have floating vs tiled windows.
You might just look through screenshots in Google Images and see what looks good to you and then install that.
They’re mostly equivalent, but I think KDE has the edge when it comes to customization, included utilities, and advanced features. The Apple/Windows comparison is not limited to their look and feel, it also applies to the philosophical differences between the Gnome and KDE teams. If you plan to use SteamVR, KDE is supposedly better for that specific use case, but I can’t personally verify that.
The feature sets and quality of both DEs are constantly improving, so a comparison from 6 months or a year ago could already be outdated. I haven’t used Gnome in quite a few years, so I’m basing this entirely on what others have said about it.