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What would you say is the most reliable, "it just works" distro currently? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev

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Obviously this is somewhat subjective, but I've had a lot of problems in my previous attempts to switch to Linux, so I'd like to create a list of distros to try out, and see what works for me. I'm mostly expecting to be doing basic office work and light gaming via Steam.

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[–] entwine@programming.dev 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Anything "immutable"

ublue family: Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin
Fedora Atomic family: Silverblue, Kinoite, ...
KDE Linux (experimental)
OpenSuse MicroOS (for servers, but possible to add a desktop)
SteamOS (limited hardware compat)

Any other answer is outdated and wrong.

Edit: holy shit the amount of mint recommendations is crazy. Stay away from mint, it sucks. It's just a less reliable version of Ubuntu. If all you like its desktop environment, that's called "Cinnamon", and it can be installed in other distros.

[–] hanrahan@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 hours ago

LMDE isn't Ubuntu redux. It's what i'm using because it was what i used from the get go 3 years ago and can't be ass'd changing because it works and has never crashed.

90% of what I do is use FF, Joplin, Darktable, Inkscape, Caliber and QBTorrent. A little gaming on Steam and Heroic and messaging on Singal Desktop is the other 10% of my use, so clicking an icon on a dock is about as easy as it gets.

My only minor annoyance is the PrtScr button on my Logitech KB doesn't work (have sollar Installed) but I just use Flameshot anyway.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

Fedora worked for me out of the box. The only software I had to install npmfusion (Nvidia driver) for a higher refresh rate and that was easy. But even without that, I had full resolution

[–] Alvaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 day ago

Headless: debian

Gui: mint

[–] nieminen@lemmy.world 4 points 22 hours ago

Been on Bazzite for a while now. Have never been happier in Linux. I'm a software engineer and occasional gamer for context

[–] shittydwarf@sh.itjust.works 29 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Besides Debian?

[–] wabasso@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 day ago

Debian is also my answer.

[–] teft@piefed.social 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Mint Debian Edition

[–] pmk@piefed.ca 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What's different between LMDE and choosing cinnamon when installing debian? Do they change anything under the hood on the debian base?

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's the same Debian base under the hood, but has:

A more user-friendly installer (I know Debian's has improved with Trixie, but Mint's is still easier IMO).
A newbie friendly welcome screen that walks them through setting up a snap shot back-up tool, theming, updates, firewall, as well as easily providing a link to help documents, and shows the user the software center exists.
The excellent Mint Software Centre Appstore (I don't think that comes with Cinnamon on a standard Debian install, I think it's just the terminal).

[–] AlexSage@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

The difference is LMDE uses debian and its packages as a base while the "cinnamon" edition uses Ubuntu as a base. I believe they both actually use cinnamon as the DE.

It's more of a just in case because a lot of the linux community isn't like Conical lately.

[–] Grimtuck@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago

Nobara for gaming. I've had issues with multiple other distros but Nobara just works. It's based on Fedora but is preconfigured with everything needed to game right away. Every other distro I've had to fix some random issue from Steam not running (latest Fedora) to game controllers needing to be remapped. Nobara sorts this all for you. Fedora for a laptop. It seems to have the best support for a variety of weird hardware. Bazzite for TV gaming. That's basically what it's built for.

[–] Flaqueman@sh.itjust.works 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Mint works perfectly for me, for that same use case

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Of the 10~20 distros I tested in these past ~4 years, Mint is the only one I needed to go way out of my way to break anything. Also most of what you'd need is orderly laid out in the "Start menu" (don't remember if it has a specific name on Linux), including there being a GUI-based "app store", so it's also pretty straight forward to install most day-to-day stuff.

[–] greatwhitebuffalo41@slrpnk.net 2 points 22 hours ago

I thought you were going to say you had to go way out of your way to fix it at first 😂 I was like wait what?

[–] bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works 1 points 20 hours ago

The only downside of Mint is outdated packages.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

I can imagine a good NixOS config working pretty well. Just need to find someone's repo that has all you need already set up.

[–] SirIglooi@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 day ago

Definitely mint for "just works", personally used it on loads of computers and haven't encountered any issues

[–] SecondComingOfPheusie@programming.dev 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Shortlist of traditional distros, ordered roughly in descending order:

Linux Mint^[Attracts most noobs and is probs the most popular out of these; no-brainer. Lack of proper Wayland support and not offering (!) a (semi-)rolling release model are the only reasons why the others deserve to be on this list. Otherwise this would sweep clean.]
Zorin OS^[If you want something slow-moving, but still need/want Wayland.]
CachyOS^[Arch-based distro, but comes with very sane defaults. Recommended if you're on very new hardware.]
Fedora^[Relatively bare-bones. Especially compared to all the other distros found on this list. But, if you want a more minimalist approach while preserving excellent defaults, then this is definitely it.]

~~Shortlist of~~ Only^[Technically, any of uBlue's distros qualifies. But Bazzite is a lot more popular than the others. Hence you'll have an easier time finding resources for it.] recommendation for atomic distros:

Bazzite^[This probs deserves a footnote of its own in which I elaborate, but I got tired. Here, have a flower; 💮.]

As for deciding between a traditional or atomic distro, I'd personally suggest to try out Bazzite first. And refer to their documentation whenever something comes up during initial setup. If at any point, you're not able to get it to work even with the help of its community —^[I know using the em dash here makes me look sus AF, but I can assure the reader that no LLMs were used in the creation of this writing.] be it through their Discord, Discourse or sub~~reddit~~ — then simply pivot to the traditional distros.

[–] classic@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago (5 children)

what is wayland and how important is it?

[–] bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

If you have HDR monitors or high resolution screens, that need fractional scaling you’re better off with Wayland and KDE.

[–] SecondComingOfPheusie@programming.dev 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

what is wayland

Basically, whenever an app has a GUI it wants to display, it communicates that to 'the system' with all the necessary details. After which 'the system' does the rendering and whatnot. Wayland is a protocol that defines a set of rules on how this interaction should take place. Hence, technically, it is only (the defining) part of the modern solution.

how important is it?

Very. Basically, either it or its 'predecessor'^[The term is used loosely here, because there's a very big difference between the two.] X11 is involved whenever you want to display/render anything^[Which, to be clear, happens literally all the time. Unless your display needs don't go beyond what was already available on MS-DOS*.] on desktop Linux. As X11 has been abandoned in favor of Wayland, some modern features like HDR or VRR are only found on the latter. On the other hand, I believe Wayland was never meant to offer full feature-parity with X11. Hence, some unsupported edge cases may continue to exist indefinitely. Thankfully, it has come a long way. What remains are some concerns related to accessibility AND the adjustment^[Like, how only very recently Electron got to become proper Wayland-native. Note that Xwayland is included with Wayland as a compatibility layer whenever something is not Wayland-native yet.] of the surrounding ecosystem.

[–] classic@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago

Thank you for the intro, that helped. Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant

[–] ChristerMLB@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

Not very. X11 is still widely used and works fine. Wayland is the future, but you'll probably be fine either way.

I copied this table from here: https://www.linuxteck.com/x11-vs-wayland/

[–] moxymarauder@thelemmy.club 1 points 1 day ago

display manager. it'll cause issues with switching applications and rendering and such. Wayland is the direction everyone is going.

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[–] HuudaHarkiten@piefed.social 10 points 1 day ago

Debian.

I think I'm a newcomer to linux even if I did use Ubuntu for many years. But generally I have no idea what I'm doing at any given time.

About a month ago I switched to Debian. No issues. Everything works. I should have changed years ago.

[–] TheMadCodger@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you want to focus primarily on gaming that can also do basic office work, check out Bazzite. If you want to do primarily basic office work that can also do gaming, check out either Bluefin or Aurora depending on whether you prefer Gnome or KDE, respectively.

All three are sister distros and are part of the immutable distros collection. Unless you actively want to tinker with your system level files, immutable distros keep everything that you need to run your computer read only. The only things you can mess up are your own files, so as long as you reboot from time to time, your computer will always be up to date and working. The result is you spend less time trying to get your computer working and more time doing whatever it is you want to be doing on it.

A lot of people will recommend Mint or Ubuntu. They're… fine, but they're not what they once were and you can do better. Don't listen to anyone who tells you to run Arch unless you are into mining your own silicon.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 points 18 hours ago

I will say the major stability improvement on immutables is just running apps in flatpaks. You take any of the stock systems (debian, opensuse, fedora) pick a popular desktop env like kde or gnome, and install nothing but updates to the baseos and flatpaks and you will be very stable.

I do love my bazite, bluefin, and kinote though.

[–] org@lemmy.org 7 points 1 day ago

Mint. It’s just good out of the box.

If you tell us what hardware you’re on, we might have other suggestions… but probably still Mint.

[–] whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Mint, debian, fedora, Ubuntu, freebsd, tails have all been pretty simple experiences imo

Pretty much just stay away from cutting edge, rolling release, build from source, beta, testing branch etc and you'll be fine, look for something with LTS in the versions name

[–] AlexSage@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

Freebsd? That one surprises me.

[–] riskable@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

All the popular distros are more reliable than Windows 🤷

[–] bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works 1 points 20 hours ago

Depends on your hardware. I have had lots of issues with Linux regarding audio quality over Bluetooth, sound quality over laptop speakers, wifi driver reliability (had to disable power save), wake from sleep. For older NVDIA cards you can choose either the unsupported old binary drivers on an old kernel version or terrible performance and bugs with the free nouveau drivers. Wayland doesn’t work with the old binary drivers either.

Getting consistent theming between different versions of Qt and GTK working feels like an impossible task.

[–] Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip 5 points 1 day ago

I really hate to be that person but that is unfortunately not always been my experience 😅

I've been using linux for like 10 years and aside from when I was doing really weird customization shit windows isnt supposed to even be able to do, I had pretty much zero issues. I've definitely experienced my fair share of jank on linux. I love it anyway, but as a less technical person I'm not entirely convinced thats always the case woth any popular distro

[–] Widdershins@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

TempleOS

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

Depends, how new is your hardware? Bleeding edge hardware is probably going to do better on a bleeding edge distro. Or at least a rolling release.

Old and crusty? Anything Debian or Ubuntu based should be more than stable.

[–] AlexSage@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've been very happy with CachyOS but would probably recommend Fedora.

[–] FatVegan@leminal.space 1 points 1 day ago

I installed catchyos last week and it's almost creepy how everything "just works"

[–] INeedANewUserName@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

I should probably change to Debian. Ubuntu has become a bit of a dumpster fire from its former glory as Debian for noobs. Also avoid Nvidia if you want it just works. (Nvidia can work... probably better than it used to but if you don't want to screw with things)

[–] SaneMartigan@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago

No issues with bazzite or kubuntu.

[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 3 points 1 day ago

I don’t use them myself but Debian or Ubuntu are probably what you’re looking for.

[–] TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Fedora (GNOME)

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[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

If you have an Nvidia GPU, it's hard to beat Linux Mint, unless you have the absolute newest bleeding edge hardware.

If you have an AMD or Intel GPU, Linux Mint Debian edition is great.

[–] moxymarauder@thelemmy.club 2 points 1 day ago

For gaming, Bazzite. It has been enough of an improvement that it has changed my opinion on immutable OS'. In my office, I use Ubuntu on Desktop/ Debian on server. But, I'm not sure those are the right answers in 2026. Ubuntu hasn't exactly made the best decisions over the last 10 years or so, I keep using them mostly out of momentum.

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@PlzGivHugs not quite "just works" entirely, but I've grown more accustomed with MX Linux. Everything is pretty much just one click away tucked into the MX Tools app and you don't need lots of skills to use it. Some of the said apps might open inside a terminal, but their options are pretty well explained.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ehhh, I'd recommend against MX if only because they don't ship with a more approachable app-store like Linux mint does.

MX's app installer tool is more similar to Aptitude, which is to say, completely functional, but entirely text based (no screenshots, reviews of apps, etc) which isn't to say it's wrong or bad, but I'd wager it'd be offputting to the average person compared to the more image-heavy and user-friendly design of app-store that Mint or Gnome-based distros have.

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@ProdigalFrog isn't discover also available in the KDE version? I don't remember

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Hm, that could be, I haven't tried their KDE version. Though I can't say I'd recommend that to a newbie either, as KDE in particular isn't a good option for Debian based systems since it uses a pretty old and (at least in my case) buggy version that won't receive any bug fixes or security updates until the next major Debian release (it's bad enough that the KDE devs themselves recommend avoiding KDE on Debian)

The older version of discover that comes with Debian is also pretty bad for newbies, IMHO. It is cluttered with non-relevant library files and system themes when searching for apps (I believe this was fixed in newer versions), and has no way to filter out potentially dangerous unverified flatpaks when flathub is enabled, which a newbie wouldn't know to look for. Mint's and Gnome's appstore don't show unverified flatpaks by default.

[–] pmk@piefed.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

With the criteria flathub uses for verification, everything in debians own repos is unverified. We're trusting the maintainer either way.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

To become a debian maintainer, you need to have already built up a rapport with Debian by being a sponsored maintainer, which lets you submit packages, but they must be approved by your sponsor. Only after establishing and proving yourself can you become a full Debian package maintainer, which also requires a trusted Debian team member advocates for you to become one based on your previous work in detail. While not impervious to bad actors, this structure creates a pretty solid level of trust in the Debian repos.

In contrast, anyone can create and submit a Flatpak to Flathub, only needing to pass a volunteer review process. Critically, after an app passes the first volunteer review process, the submitter can then push updates to the flatpak without review, meaning they could initially upload a clean version of an app, then push a version with malware in an update. Personally I don't think that security model is as effective at preventing malware compared to the Debian model of slowly building trust before being given the keys.

Verified flatpaks, on the other hand, require the submitter to verify they are part of the dev team for that application to the Flathub team, which makes them pretty much as trustable as any Debian repo package, which make them a good, safe default to show for an appstore (IMO).

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