A coworker of mine asked me to help him install Linux, he hasn’t tried Linux before but he’s sick of Windows.
He is very much into gaming, so gaming support is the first priority. He is also a developer/tester so I suppose that he will also want to have access to dev tools, languages, and other packages like that for personal projects.
My first go-to when recommending to newbies is Mint because it’s simple, tried and tested, but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience. However it scares me that there’s no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks and brew, or even podman images. Will this be a problem as he uses the OS for general usage besides gaming in the long term, would it be better to just go with Mint and set that up for gaming instead?
Feel free to also recommend other distros, but keep in mind that while he is technical, he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
If you’re able to be there for the install, then great. I’ve had a couple of times where, due to certain hardware, it needs a different sound server or some other workaround. In an extreme case, you might need to fallback to a second choice of distro.
Is there anything specific you’ve heard that applies to your friend’s needs? (Honest question, I haven’t looked deep into it.)
If it’s just small things like ‘Steam and [etc] is installed already’, then you can just do that easily anyway.
Keep in mind that Mint uses apt and (optionally, but IMO inevitably for a gamer/dev) Flatpaks integrated in their package manager, which has gotten much smoother but still is two different systems which can cause confusion. I don’t know how Bazzite handles this.