Every time I stray from Mint I am reminded why I go back to it.

Well crap

It has to do with muxing for the dGPU. I have bashed my head against this what seems like endlessly. My suggestion is that you should enable only dedicated gpu mode in your bios. That has worked for me. It kind of sucks because you feel like you are leaving performance on the table, but I have found nothing that works properly on any DE in any configuration.

At the end of the day it is basically a hardware issue, and for your specific hardware it will not work. I’m my limited opinion.

I have a zellij snd micro config for journaling and writing that makes a completely borderless full screen terminal with no decoration whatsoever and narrows the terminal for micro to the upper half of the middle 1/3 of my screen.

It helps me focus and limiting to the upper half and middle 1/3 makes it easier for my eyes. I get distracted easily and this helps keep my editor from being the source of that.

Chronic distro hopper here. It brings some interesting defaults and is probably easier to get gaming on than default Arch. Lots of stuff that is above my head for performance optimizing, but in all honesty it’s not THAT incredibly different than default Arch, or even default mint. At least on my hardware which is a 3070 Nvidia 12th gen Intel laptop. It does make an impact, but your mileage may vary.

You know how some people really like cars and spend endless time on the garage tweaking and tuning things? Cachy feels like the distro version of that for Linux. If you are an enthusiast then it is great, but you had better be prepared to figure out what esoteric thing broke and why your “car” now no longer works.

Mint is driving a car, Arch/Cachy is being a car enthusiast. Both will get you places, but one is probably going to get you to the grocery store more reliably.

I’ve done dozens of distros and Linux mint is the most familiar, unexciting, and stable one I have found. Ignore the hate. Real Linux fans don’t care how you participate in open source, other than being toxic. Consequently, do whatever you want and install whatever seems like it would be something you’d want to use.

Id highly suggest having a separate hard drive for Linux as it can be easy to break dual boot if you don’t know what you are doing. Last thing you want to do is panic and decide you need to reinstall Windows.

I have distro hopped my dang brains out with everything under the sun. I’m back to Mint. It works without being an absolute pain and is boring as watching paint dry, which is the point of an OS. I just use it to compute, work, code, and game. it boots and updates eventually.

I ended up installing docker. Didn’t want to make a bunch of systemd files. It automatically updates each day and has required almost no maintenance at all. It’s a little strange, but can work great.

I continue to have a hard time with it. I desperately want to like it but feel like it doesn’t handle laptop Nvidia right. I keep getting boot to black screen on KDE and have to rfkill unblock on install and just a host of issues I can’t seem to ever nail down. Might have to try again since switcherooctl, but there are some rough edges for me.

Love MicroOS for server though. Rock solid.

Something that produces a wealth of plausible web traffic on my connection and browser that woefully misleads anyone monitoring it as to what I actually am browsing. Rather than hiding my traffic or ensuring some hyper level of encryption I simply want to use maybe an LLM or something to create such a close facimilie to “normal” online traffic that my online fingerprint becomes useless as sub 5% of my traffic is actually real.

Essentially I want privacy through drowning out everything with noise. It seems like the harder the to unwind in the end if done in a clever way. That plus some basic security protections and I will feel fairly secure.

You can configure the system for backup and auto updates which is handy to keep it secure without any interaction. Only reason I ever had it fail was entirely me screwing it up, usually by distro hopping and formatting wrong.

Mint is surprisingly loved and disliked from what I have seen. Having used it since 2007 I am in the category that likes it for what it is. But I am somewhat surprised by the open hostility it gets for simply existing. Main arguments being that it is a dinosaur, uses X11, should not exist because anything not KDE or GNOME is just diluting desktop Linux and is part of the problem. It has no fancy corporate sponsor, it has a small team, and it for sure has warts, but you can claw Linux Mint from my cold dead hard drive because I have distro hopped like an addict and it just checks the boxes for me. It shows up and works, even on newer hardware with a little tweaking here and there, but I can use Nvidia, find network printers without effort, scan, install and update flatpak, backup the system, game, and get actual work done that is not fiddle farting around with esoteric configs all the time. I can post on actual forums with actual users on it and not some discord where someone will just post memes over my questions. I have a strong feeling it will exist for a long while given it’s history. And it is mind numbingly borning as an OS. I just sit down and compute, what a concept.

Portainer has been great. I almost don’t need ssh

I jumped on that waayyyyyyy to early convincing people to install Ubuntu or Mint on their machines in 2007. I learned a lot unscrewing up a lot of machines. The winding path of learning.

Can always install xanmod if you want a newer kernel and more recent improvements. There are plenty of ways to make it more exciting, difference being you get to choose those from what I would consider a rock solid base. Many distros sort of foist the making things exciting upon you because all of the sudden you’ll want to use a printer and become dismayed that your network printer doesn’t just work, or that Bluetooth isn’t doing what you want, or you’ll run into an issue and find only a disorganized discord for support. When your beard turns gray you tend towards the boring because, at least for me, editing esoteric configs to make my printer works has lost its excitement.

You are absolutely right today is a far cry from 15 years ago, but just looking at raw marketshare Linux is like 3% of gaming machines. large portions being steam deck. Linux is excellent in a lot of ways but having what I would call mainstream popularity is not one of them. Though with continued effort on the part of the community to make everything better and MS for making everything worse, who knows what the future holds.

I can’t think of an arch base that does not require fiddling of some sort. In a similar way, desktop Linux is more or less the enthusiast OS. You are kind of like the car person of computing. You do need to be comfortable with messing around with the system to get what you want.

I can think of a few nin-arch bases that require much less messing around with, but they are more “boring” than arch. I use Mint with auto updates and time shift backup. It doesn’t get more boring than X11 on a stable Ubuntu core. Flatpak install OBS and steam and set your computing on cruise control.

If you demand more excitement that a decades old DE Pop_OS shares a similar stability with some newer trimming. I also had a lot of success with Nobara if you want a non-Ubuntu core and desire something slightly with a little more pizazz.

Only commentary would be you will want to go for the Edge ISO with the 6.2 Kernel because certain functions of your hardware might not work otherwise. I have a 2022 Lenovo Legion 5i with an nvidia 3070 GPU and it took some doing to get working properly. Suspend did not work, backlight needed tweaking, and things like RGB will also need to be figured out.

I mercifully left myself a guide for how to reinstall my OS (I’m a chronic distro hopper).

https://midwest.social/post/1266950

PS: Nobara was awesome till I had an issue and the only forum was, in my experience, a somewhat unresponsive Discord. Garuda, CachyOS, and a dozen other distros all had their ups and downs but Linux Mint holds a special place in my old heart given I freaking used it in high school in 2007. The forums and community will be here for what I assume is longer than most distros. For all the hoopla made of Wayland on gnome and KDE being all corporate supported and fancy I have seen miniscule difference between that and good ol X11 Mint. Clem (Guy being Mint) has been a studious and unexcitable hand guiding choices over the years. Don’t expect the newest and fanciest things going on over at mint. Expect the most mind shatteringly boring experience as you use you OS for programming, gaming, and computing I’m general as opposed to editing obscure config files, scraping through forums for answers, or reinstalling because you broke it.

I am bias and old but you can pull Linux Mint from my cold dead hands.

MicroOS has worked well as a server for me. Run everything as a container. Use caddy and portainer for reverse proxy and container manager respectively. Auto updates, immutable, and has been bulletproof for me for awhile now.

Bottles has isolation. You can further that with the flatpak version of bottles.