I’d suggest OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and one of the UBlue images - maybe Bazzite, since you mentioned gaming. But Steam and GOG run on all of those.

first off, do you realize where we’re at? normies don’t frequent lemmy

No need to be passive aggressive, but if you think all people on lemmy are so tech savvy, then why post it here?

Maybe you can also find open source communities in your area. After some digging, I was surprised how many groups there are in my area and they are always happy to get additional hands to organize stuff or run errands etc.

Sure it’s allowed, but we have these questions a lot, so some enthusiasts made some really great posts with tons of info, for example:

https://lemmy.ml/post/12123645

https://lemmy.ml/post/18268622

I’d recommend to read through them, then come back and ask more specific questions.

For all those suggesting Bazzite, Ublue (including Bazzite) images are offline installers only, see: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/couldnt-get-aurora-into-test-mode-in-live-usb/4567

Oh good to know, last time I checked they said on their website they’re not supporting it. That’s great news, thanks!

Yeah Waydroid doesn’t support these yet sadly.

Waydroid not working? You don’t happen to have an Nvidia card, do you?

I really like Mint, but I wouldn’t say it “has relatively up-to-date updates”.

First thing that came to mind was Fedora, if you are willing to try an immutable distro I highly recommend Bazzite, but tinkering has its limits there.

I didn’t say it was. I posted the quote from the website to clarify.

From their website:

"Update on Your Terms

Pop!_OS provides the latest features and security patches through rolling updates and periodic OS version upgrades, to be performed at your discretion. And if you want a clean slate, the Refresh Install feature resets your OS while preserving the files in your Home folder. "

Interesting, thanks! Never heard of Nitrux before.

Yes that’s true. I just realised that I apparently tinker too much to use an immutable distro as of now. But I’m definitely keeping an eye on them.

Yes of course, that’s always an option. I was just trying to look over my Mint horizon and check out other distros and how they work. Exciting!

I like that article, I’m in a similar position at the moment. I’ve been using Mint on my Nvidia machine for a long time now, but with the new Mint 22 update that’s also based on Ubuntu 24.04, I’m facing similar issues and so I’ve done some distrohopping over the past couple of weeks. I’ve tried Aurora/Bazzite and Nobara as Fedora based distros, Garuda and CachyOS as Arch based ones, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and probably something else I can’t remember right now. All of them were great distros but had certain flaws that were offputting somehow. And I’m in no rush, since Mint 21.3 is still supported for a while.

I’m still open to suggestions what to try next! I’m getting faster and faster with fresh installs :)

Thank you Mint team, you rock!

A bad time to install Tumbleweed? I just downloaded the ISO today, not kidding.

You might misunderstand how their “ratings” work - they simply collect all reports and when people had trouble with the game before, and gave a negative or “tinkering required” rating, it will show in the overall stats.

Depends on what you are playing, but gaming in Linux has come a long way. Some games won’t work due to companies not enabling their (rootkit) “anti-cheats” for Linux, but other than that, there’s more and more games that simply work by the day. Check out https://www.protondb.com/ to get an idea of what’s working at the moment.

I really liked it, I had the Flatpak version installed, but when opening larger text documents (with 20+ pages) it took forever to open them, so I stopped using it.

What a stupid headline.

“So who are these people? They’re a bit more likely to be female. While both the comparison groups were roughly evenly split between male and female, the superspreaders were 60 percent female. They’re also older, on average 58 years old, nearly 20 years older than the sample as a whole.”