Hello guys i have a qustion about which distro i should use?
I want to dual boot windows and linux
I just want a safe place away from microsoft eyes to do edit and drawing and other hobbies on my pc. And playing some games like cs2 & 2d games Also the distro run my wallpaper engine Should be popular distro so if i have a problem i can ask about it
Please dont tell me linux mint because i tried it 3 times and everytime i do anything simple the distro goes off and i should re install i won’t give it anymore chances thank you 😖
Edit: thank you guys for typing your suggests. after some search i will give bazzite try and if won’t work like i want. I will go with the other suggests I really enjoyed reading all your suggests
My advice: Stick to distros and softwares that are widely used. When presented with options, tend to stick to the defaults.
Just because literally 100% is customizable in the Linux world does not mean you have to customize your system 100%.
That’s my motto since 1996 when I started using Linux.
I suggest you to check out Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. I have been using it for years without any problems. I also have dual boot with Windows, but I think I will delete Windows soon and use only Linux.
My name is none of your business, and I approve this suggestion.
For most of us using Linux distros for years, we already have a preferred distro that is highly unlikely to be Ubuntu or even Debian based, but for first-timers, I honestly believe Mint is the way to go.
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
You say not to suggest mint, but you most probably used an Ubuntu based Mint so that doesn’t count.
Keep to popular distros. I’d personally recommend Pop os or fedora. Opensuse is up there too just never clicked with me when I was a new users.
I actually have started to discourage people using Ubuntu because of forced snap packages and multiple software store GUIs. It has led to a lot more confusion for new users even though Ubuntu is supposed to be user friendly.
Agreed. It was good for that for a long while, but there are much better options for newbies nowadays.
If you’re new then fedora is great
It’s worth noting that fedora is heavily sponsored by RedHat (a subsidiary of IBM) and is the upstream testing ground for RHEL (Redhats commercial offering). RedHat also has close ties to Israels government and it’s military.
This is a huge dealbreaker for someone like me so I feel it’s necessary to mention.
Not to get into politics but the whole point of Linux is about being open and used by anyone from anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to see various parts of the Linux kernel, drivers, etc developed/funded by people from Israel, Russia, and many many other countries.
Edit: the point of this message, this type of approach to your OS choice will ultimately result in throwing your PC in the trash if you dig deep enough.
There is a vast difference between a community driven project like Debian taking small contributions from people who happen to be in Israel/incorporating some things from RedHat after lots of vetting and diluting and Fedora being a direct upstream testing ground for RedHat who are the primary contributors and maintainers.
No, this type of approach will not lead to you throwing your PC in the trash, it will simply lead to you being more aware of your software and how it functions,what it contributes to, and what contributes to it. Which is a good thing imo.
For example, I use LMDE. Yes, there are most definitely contributions from redhat in my machine. the difference is between
RedHat engineers -> Fedora.
And
RedHat engineers -> Fedora -> Upstream Project acceptance-> Debian -> LMDE.
I’m not saying you need to stop using Fedora. But everyone draws a line somewhere and I’m simply making my knowledge on this known for people who’s line may be in a similar place to mine.
I’m sorry to inform you but Ubuntu is Debian based and is very much used by governments around the world. IMO, the line your drawing is squiggly with breaks in between. As I stated before, your opinion contradicts the entire ethos of Linux and if one uses a Fedora based distribution it means little to nothing politically.
You’re lying to yourself if you don’t think Debian is in direct benefit of the engineering work sponsored/paid for by IBM, Canonical, Google, AWS, Intel, AMD, and many other massive enterprises.
99% of the time a dual boot doesn’t work its because of Windows. There should be no real reason that Mint fails anything simple as long as its compatible with your system. I’ve seen others report that Windows will occasionally destroy a dual boot when updating.
@Mojtaba you can try Manjaro, is a nice distro
Any major distro will work, it’s the Desktop Environment that you’ll want to examine. Whether GNOME, KDE, Xfce, etc. the DE is what you’ll mostly deal with when computing. Try distrowatch.com for a good overview of various flavors. I, personally, have always started newbies off with PCLOS with KDE, as Tex tends to avoid the bleeding edge in favor of stability.
I just installed Nobara in a similar setup for similar reasons a few days ago after having several bad experiences with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint. I wanted to move away from Ubuntu-based distros and Nobara seems like it’s focused on gaming (frequent updates, etc). It’s been… I dunno if great is the right word, but pretty good. I run into difficulties of some variety with almost everything I do (can’t install battle.net in lutris because it hangs at 45%, lutris can’t log into epic games store, etc), but I’ve also found solutions for them without too much trouble and the games that I have managed to install run great.
Yeh I don’t think Nobara is beginner friendly. I’d say my experience was the same as yours. Difficulties with lots of things, but could find solutions. Given it wasn’t my primary PC, and I don’t have time for that - gone for mint (needed some stale stale kernl)
Honestly I suggest learning in avm first so you can do save states. I recommend doing stunting like nix or a declarative/ composable distro. Learn the new way so that your getting the tools and things that are actually being used.
Don’t get me wrong it’s not an easy learning curve but I think it’s the better method of learning.
Honestly, Linux Mint is probably the best option. Failing that, Fedora is another good option which is derived from Red Hat, it does things differently to Debian based systems like Mint and Ubuntu, but it’s widely supported.
You’ll need to iterate what you were doing when it stopped working, 99% of the time, it’s down to human error. As someone once said:
“Unix [or Linux] will give you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. If you didn’t think rope would do that, you should have read the man page.”
It’s 2025, if you’ve got the space to dual boot, you’ve got space for snapshots. There’s no reason not to set them up. Btrfs, ZFS, LVM, pick your poison. Disk is cheap, your time isn’t.
And if “simple stuff” is breaking your system, that tells me three things:
-
You’re still using apt-get instead of apt
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You’re ignoring dependency warnings
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You’re probably not fully understanding the commands you’re running — so RTFM
So yeah, I will be telling you to use Mint, with at LEAST daily snapshots.
Well no i really use everyting on the newest version and i check two times on everyting i put or press even when downloading anything simple like discord or browser i search first then do but it just somewho goes off and now i spent more than 15 hours on bazzite to just download it. i am learning first then act after doing everyting things right and checking i said to myself this time i won’t mess with the termnal for 2 days to not make my system broke and guess what after downloading steam and brave and wallpaper engine and dis i was looking at my downloaded wallpapers changing them then the screen goes black and the desktop dosent response i can search inside the system and open taps but the desktop broke and now i am looking for soultion i didn’t even put a single command or play with the system i was just changing my wallpapers and that also happened in mint not the wallpaper issue but with other simple things like download one app form the software manger
Okay, assuming you’re being honest, it sounds like a hardware issue. Either your RAM is corrupting, or your hard drive is prone to errors. The good news is that you have options to daily drive Linux without ending up in a situation where you have to reinstall everything from scratch.
Like I mentioned earlier, you absolutely need to be making snapshots. I’m currently running Manjiro, and I’ve completely borked my system like 10 times already. But when I set up my system, I made sure my main partition was BTRFS, which has allowed me to roll back easily through both the UI and in grub rescue mode.
I would also recommend that if you are going to continue to dual boot windows, make sure they’re on two separate physical drives. And don’t share stuff like your steam library, because windows likes to screw shit up, and steam will throw a fit if you make it read an NTFS drive on Linux.
Just don’t give up, keep posting questions, and maybe even come back and post stuff like specific crash reports and system info so we can help you better. :)
I fix the problem it was just the plugn who read wallpaper engine i think glitched after reading a unSubscribed wallpaper so i just had to go delete the plugn and all my wallpapers and re install after some reboot and changing the wallpapers settings it fixed dont ask me how the wallpaper was unSubscribed and there in the same time i really dont know 😂
Sounds more like a hardware issue. Screen black, like it goes off no output? Any visual glitching first? Desktop doesn’t respond? How do you know, is it sounds stop or make funny noise?
Search inside the system? Open taps? Not sure what this means
Can you restart the computer? Or will the distro not boot after this?
And this doesn’t happen in Windows?
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I dunno, I started with Debian and then many months later learned that it was one of the harder distributions given the outdated packages.
Glad I chose Debian because Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, PureOS, etc are all derivatives of it.
I suggest BazziteOS. I have it installed on 2 of my computers for about a year and it works great. It runs KDE and it looks similar to Windows but is much better. Also, I believe it has support for Wallpaper Engine, though I haven’t tried it.
It is Fedora based and Fedora also has a sizeable community for any questions and tutorials you may have.
The reason why I recommend Bazziteos is because it comes out of the box ready for gaming, you would have steam, wine, lutris, etc installed almost instantly and ready to play.
I just finished downloading bazzite and now creating a backup on flash for both bazzite and windows using ventoy because i know myself i will do something stupid to make me re install systems
Chances are that, if you do break something, it’ll be on the Windows side.
Bazzite is very solid for new users as it’s very convoluted to access and modify anything system related.
Having said that, if you have any intention to learn how to use Linux distros, and eventually remove Microsoft from your life, immutable distros like Bazzite will limit you dramatically, so I suggest you start with a regular “mutable” distro. Now, if your intention is just to have something that works, scape Windows every now and then, and come back to Windows, it’s hard to beat an immutable distro.
I’m pretty sure you can also advance with Bazzite. I haven’t done anything too advanced, but I can imagine one can learn a lot simply by learning the ujust commands as they would apt.
Absolutely. Maybe I’m a bit biased. I can’t stick to anything immutable (other than my Steam Deck, and believe me, I’ve tried many times), and always come back to distros I can have absolute control over.
However, I have all my employees running Silverblue (mostly because none of them even know what CLI means 🤣).
I’m not sure that you can get wallpaper engine running. Maybe someone else can say otherwise, but I wouldn’t trust second hand.
There is a project that can run some backgrounds, but is very experimental and IMHO not suited for running constantly as a desktop background. WPE is way too deep in specific windows features to be able to run on linux smoothly.
