🤞pleasejustpickbazzite pleasejustpickbazzite pleasejustpickbazzite🤞
I’m going to install CachyOS, an Arch-based distro
oh god dammit
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Bazzite is much worse for a new user then cachy. Worse documentation and a load of quirks from being immutable.
Frankly they would be better off with mint unless they need very up to date hardware support for like a laptop.
Cachy's not that bad for beginners. I just did a test install on an old Nvidia PC, and it works for gaming OOTB.
We've come a looooong way from Manjaro. I wouldn't wish Manjaro on my worst enemy, to be clear.
I haven't used Manjaro in many many years, but IIRC it was the first distro I used that reliably supported Wi-Fi.
Are you looking for fellow Bazzite users? (I'm one of them)
Good to meet you brother/sister! We walk a rather lonesome road but glad I stand alongside you
I'm standing slightly to the left of you.
Just went from Bazzite to Steam OS on my TV PC. It's a little less flexible but I don't use desktop mode for much on the TV or want to install anything outside a few emulators and external game launchers. I've had too many updating issues with Bazzite over the years. The recent deal breaker was sunshine broke preventing it from updating.
I'M FED UP, GOING TO INSTALL LINUX!
- picks a complicated distro where you really need to read the manual or do some heavy google searches to do gaming *
I'M FED UP, THIS IS TOO HARD, I'M GOING BACK TO WINDOWS!
Every. Single. Time.
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CachyOS has been flawless on my S/O's desktop. From an easy install to plenty of documentation available, I couldn't have asked for much more. During install, there's an entire step dedicated to checking a box if you want to play games. (To enable non-free drivers).
I don't think it was a poor choice.
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What's the easiest and most secure linux distro for a non-techie? This is for a spare thinkpad I want to try linux on.
Mint. It’s a great, simple, well supported first distro. And last distro, TBH. I know plenty of people like to distro hop as a hobby, but if you just want to use your machine pick a well supported basic distro and stick with it. Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora are all good options, but Mint is really aimed at newcomers.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu has broken too many times on my computers for me to recommend it anymore
Good mix of usability and learning curve. You will need terminal, but that's never been easier with AI assistants to learn how. Plenty of support for applications or open source workarounds. It also is familiar enough to use rather quickly, but not so much that it feel like a Windows clone. Highly recommend starting with Ubuntu.
Mint is great, but if you have a touchscreen ThinkPad like I do and actually like to use the touchscreen a lot, Mint is very hit or miss.
I installed Fedora with Gnome and it works beautifully with the touchscreen.
Mint. Cinnamon is great. MATE if you have a less powerful computer. XFCE for potatoes.
That's going to vary based on your definition of 'secure', and in my experience, most distros are very secure, it's usually the user that ends up messing the security up.
I've installed mint, pop os and Ubuntu. TBH if it's a spare, just download one and give it a go.
I really just play games and use a browser, so it's been easy peasy for me. Look into making a partition for /home if you feel like you'll swap around it makes it pretty easy. Then you can try a few out without too much of an issue.
Installed Mint last week. I already ported most of my personal stuff there ; as a user of FOSS software, it was a breeze. Still dual booting Windows because of work, but I'll start trying to see if I can get the required tools to work on there too.
For now, my biggest issue was that connecting my Bluetooth headphones to both Linux and Windows was fucky but, lo and behold, there was a guide online that told me exactly how to make sure both OS had the same device ID.
It's not a painless experience yet, but it's way less painful than what it was running Win95 back then. And it feels so good to finally flip Microsoft the bird.
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If you going to install Linux, install something basic like Ubuntu, fedora, mint and pop is!
Now tons of people will start searching for cachyos, because the vegre did.
Nothing wrong with Arch as a distro base. The meme stuff is all bullshit. It is a peer of Debian and Fedora. These foundational community distros are not a good starting point for a beginner or for a painless consumerist experience but they are solid for experienced users and have the best support and documentation.
If you are approaching Linux from the PoV of someone who wants to learn rather than someone who wants a reliable consumer computing platform the big community distros are still absolutely the right way to go IMO.
People go on about Mint being friendly for users but under the surface it is Ubuntu which itself is pulling from Debian. People laud Bazzite despite it being Fedora based. ChromeOS is shipping Gentoo to school children. If you package Arch well and ship it to people like Valve has its an extremely pleasant consumer platform. CachyOS improves the arch installation and micro-optimises FPS but you can screw it up as easily as any other mutable Linux system so fundamentally it is not much better or worse than Mint or Ubuntu or Fedora for a consumer experience.
SteamOS, Bazzite and ChromeOS all recognise that immutability is the key to a reliable experience for consumers - an experience that surpasses Windows. Updates are the most likely way to break a system and the hardest thing for non expert users to troubleshoot and rectify. Immutable distros with good support for new hardware have to be the S tier choice for Windows refuges. I have never tried Bazzite and likely never will (I use arch btw, with one system being a cachyos hybrid) but on paper it seems like the most sane choice barring a general release of StreamOS. A distro like Mint might be user friendly but it is bringing nothing new to the table when it comes to a reliable experience for consumers.
The real solution for the majority of WIndows refuges is going to be pre-installs with the supplier guaranteeing all the hardware is supported like Steam Machine. That way you get rid of all the cursed Nvidia systems. I think something like PopOS is the wrong way to do it for normies as the old LTT videos demonstrated, it is still a fragile system for naive users underneath the friendly skin.
I think you need to revisit a modern Debian 13.x distro. From install to hardware support with effortless kde plasma and a stable software level easily extensible with flatpak, it's what Ubuntu was 10 years ago.
Anyone who says to avoid it today, especially with the AI and rocm/cuda apt packages that just work out of the box, I'm convinced haven't considered it from an eager beginner perspective in recent form.
I still use Debian all the time. Have for over quarter of a century. I develop in a debian container and run Debian in production. For years I used unstable, pinning etc on desktop/laptop and can make Debian work on modern hardware. I tried arch and was suprised how much I liked it. It is a very vanilla upstream experience. The Debian maintainers have added a lot of baggage over time and some of it annoys the hell out of me (particularly when they add shit patches to ssh). Otherwise it might have been my distro for life.
All Linux regular distros give the user complete control over their system (as they should) and that can be a problem for people coming from Windows. Microsoft had to protect them from deleting their system directory because it turns out people are actually that stupid. People like Linus Sebastian get views telling a Youtube audience of millions how one command made his Linux install unusable. And it is a legit criticism for a typical Windows refuge. We need to re-learn all the shit Microsoft discovered over the last 30 years about what complete morons their users can be because we never cared about that. Linux was for power users and destroying your system a right of passage.
Our football team preferences make no difference to Windows refugees. They want a game console experience, an android/ios experience. Something better than the shitshow that is Windows. We can do that. I have never used Bazzite and it might be shit but they are trying to address those users. SteamOS and ChromeOS do a very good job providing a safe install for non-technical users based on arch and gentoo. The base distro ultimately doesn't matter as much as we think it does. The differences between Ubuntu and Debian aren't that huge. But you ship updates as a signed immutable root with a fallback to the previous install and run everything else out of user storage and your in consumer appliance territory.
I'm an experienced Linux user, I put Bazzite on my old machine that I'm using as an HTPC.
It's imperfect. The install process is quite brittle, especially if you're doing something as mundane as "I want the OS on this SSD and my home folder on that SSD".
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