From the perspective of being committed to not use anything Meta, I think it’s great that it exists. It’s very convenient that you can ask any third party or businesses to send any image or document through RCS instead of having to use WhatsApp, which a lot of them use by default these days. I personally ask them if they can first send it through Signal, but not a lot of them would do so and hence it becomes easier to make them use something that already exists on their phone by default.

Those serious about encryption would use Signal or Threema or other such apps anyway. But otherwise, this is great, especially now that it’s on both iOS and Android.

^This is the answer.

Mint still does not work well with Wayland from what I can tell, and if you need features like HDR, you’re gonna have to stick to something that runs Wayland well.

While Bazzite seems fine, it is an atomic distro. If you were to try installing certain software natively, like another Firewall for instance, it might not work. And if you continue to layer such software, the update times can take longer.

Cachy(with KDE) seems very stable to me. You’ll pretty much find every software through the repo. If not, you’ll have to manually install flatpak yourself. Never had to do it myself though. But it shouldn’t be a hassle, I think.

It has its own proton variant and they recommend that you disable Steam preshader caching and increase maximum shader cache size when you’re using Proton-Cachy or GE.

Thank you for bolstering the point, my good fellow.

And Valve themselves discourage it. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows

No. When someone wants to switch to GNU/Linux, don’t also shove your other opinions onto them. There’s nothing wrong with Firefox or Chromium, which often come preinstalled.

I said this was my experience and there is a reason why I started using/recommending these apps. A lot of people would just simply disagree with you claiming that Firefox or Chromium have nothing wrong. People already hate AI features being built into Firefox and don’t want google’s tentacles around their neck on chromium.

This whole section is way too long. Here’s what it should say: Use Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. Or if your entire focus is gaming, use Bazzite.

Again, this has been my experience. And the title does say ‘comprehensive’ guide. Not a quick guide.

No new user gives a fuck what Linux distribution is. They don’t care what atomic distribution is. And talking to them about Arch can only lead to disaster.

I’ve been asked in Bluesky about what a distro is by some people. And I had to explain it to them. So yeah, they do care.

No. Do not recommend unsupported distribution which doesn’t work with the most popular GPU brand to any new users.

And that is exactly what I meant. Are you sure you’re reading it correctly? I included it and explicitly did not recommend it so that people don’t get misled from posts online making them believe that SteamOS will bring about the Year of the Linux and so on.

This section unnecessary since the previous section should already direct the new user to either Mint or Bazzite.

Mint is great. Bazzite is great.

But not everyone will be looking for X11 support and therefore Mint. And wrt Bazzite, not everyone will want to use an atomic distro.

I see you want to simply stuff and just ask people to resort to one or two things. But that’s not going to stop people. They’re going to experiment different things. Hence the ‘comprehensive’ guide. People reading carefully and having good reading comprehension will already see that I mentioned Mint to be the most friendly and popular, and also explained in detail about how one can rollback from a failed state with Bazzite.

That would already point the users, who want things to just work, towards them.

There should be no ‘if’. A new user should not do manual partitioning. If they are interested in doing it, they’re already way too advanced to read your tutorial.

I asked people to ignore it if they don’t want it. And once again, this is a ‘comprehensive’ guide.

Uh? Why? Let them use NTFS if the drive is in NTFS

I’ve explained what goes wrong with it and I’ve also stated for people who dual boot that NTFS can get corrupt and how to resolve it. For those who are only on Linux, I’ve been told that running fsck(file system consistency check) on a corrupted NTFS drive may not go well. Hence the reason I asked them to convert it to ext4.

If I’m wrong on this, please do shed light. I’ll correct myself on this.

Update 2:

Unfortunately, even with secureboot disabled, I kept getting freezes. Got 3 freezes and I felt done with this. Replaced Bazzite with Nobara again.

Nvidia driver worked for a while. But, after I temporarily switched back to another atomic distro I’m dual booting on a completely separate drive(which requires secure boot for nvidia driver to work and it did work), Nobara stopped loading nvidia driver despite clearing all secure boot keys and installing the default one in UEFI/BIOS and turning off SecureBoot.

Apparently, the efi also has to be modified again. I didn’t bother doing it and reinstalled Nobara again since that will reset the efi anyway. Now, the driver is working again. I swear to any seemingly non-existent higher power that I’ll never use any distro that requires secure boot. Lol. I’m gonna reinstall Arch on my second drive now.

That said, I’d probably recommend Bazzite to anyone not having Nvidia GPU and it’s a pretty impressive project. It even comes with Wallpaper Engine baked in. My friend and I were having a hard time making it work on their system. We were trying some solutions we found on github and some C++ file didn’t have a particular header or something. Took a while to get it work and it was kinda messy later on too with the plasma shell crashing cause of it. Having additions like this would surely make life easier for regular users who would not want to deal with that mess.

Update:

Okay, I keep getting the same freeze again with the proprietary nvidia driver too. My suspicion is now heavily on Secureboot being enabled. Some Arch people kept warning me about this back in the day.

I’m going to use Bazzite without it and probably rebase again to open driver if there is no more freezes.

Thanks. The downloader gives me an option to rebase, which I find easier to use. It shows me an option to download from ostree-unverified-registry, but I chose to do it from ostree-image-signed:docker instead. Don’t know why the signed image is not shown on the downloader by default. That said, after switching to nvidia from nvidia-open, the driver version still remains the same. Let’s see if I get freezes again in the upcoming days.

Also, there are two applications that I use outside of flatpak - a firewall(Safing Portmaster) and another password manager, for which I have to install using the rpm installer. The password manager has no problem installing using the rpm-ostree install <name.rpm> command. However, Portmaster installs, but won’t work because of the following error which I found from journalctl.

Jul 05 16:28:23 bazzite systemd[1]: Started portmaster.service - Portmaster by Safing.
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5786]: Error: failed to exec lock: open /opt/safing/portmaster/core-lock.pid: read-only file system
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5860]: Error: please set the data directory using --data=/path/to/data/dir
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

Someone has supposedly a work in-progress script to make this work, but I don’t think I’m qualified to scrutinize if doing this brings down the security of the system in any way.

And I don’t know if many other rpm installers have the same trouble installing in atomic distros because it’s a read-only file system. For now, I’ll have to live without my favorite firewall.

I tried two distros in the past week after your recommendation - Bazzite and Nobara. Bazzite is just like you say and all’s good most of the time and I’m getting used to an atomic distro too. The only problem I seem to be having is that my GPU Freezes very often even while just browsing and I have to force-restart to recover.

journalctl shows me this error. [drm:nv_drm_gem_alloc_nvkms_memory_ioctl [nvidia_drm]] ERROR [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID …] Failed to allocate NVKMS memory for GEM object

I don’t know if this is because Bazzite uses a slightly older Nvidia (open) driver(570.64) and kernel(6.14.6) or because of something else.

However, I don’t have this issue on Nobara and it uses the latest 6.15.4 and Nvidia (proprietary? akmod) driver (570.153). Correlation is not probably causation, but this might be one thing to consider.

And I’ve had issues with nvidia-open drivers in the past, but surely a lot of them seem to have gone now.

Well, it’s just 4-5 lines that you’re going to have to type and it’s just a one-time thing. Surely, it’s not that intimidating.

Bazzite seems to be based on Fedora Kinoite, an atomic desktop. Now, I haven’t used atomic desktops. Although I wanted to, I ended up not doing that for the following reason.

From what I understand, you can’t easily alter the base image of the system and everything else is a flatpak. This seems fine, but if you end up having to install an application for which there is no Flatpak, how would a non-tech savvy user do that? Still have to use the terminal at that point, I’d bet.

Case in point, even the other day, I came across this application called ‘syncplay’ for which there’s no flatpak alternative and thankfully, Fedora repo had it.

I also hear that if you end up installing apps this way(Layering as it’s called?), the update times become slower. You may shed some light on this.

Also, while it may not be as good as a snapshot system of the atomic desktops, the regular Fedora nonetheless shows the last two kernel installations on every boot so you could revert back to one if an update goes wrong.

I also have to mention that I always have my important files backed up on HDD or cloud that in the worst case scenario of losing my files on any update, (which hasn’t happened so far btw), I can always restore them. In case of Steam games, it shouldn’t be a problem if you have a fast internet connection. You should download them back in no-time. That is another reason I can still live without having to use a stable atomic desktop.

A lot of people here have already given good advice. I shall add my experience, recommendation and some tips (may incidentally repeat some of them).

1. If you play some games with kernel level anti-cheat (like Rainbow Six Siege, Apex, Valorant, LoL, Fortnite, Battlefield games, Destiny 2 among others), you will have to stick to dual-boot. Check on ProtonDB for compatibility of games. I have 500+ games on Steam and pretty much everything I’ve played has worked so far.

In terms of other software you use, make sure you have alternatives that work on Linux.

• For Photoshop, there’s Krita/GIMP.
• For Video editing, there’s Kdenlive, DaVinci Resolve, etc.
• For browsing and office apps, there’s LibreWolf and LibreOffice.

If you happen to have any software that you don’t have a good alternative or that only runs on Windows, then you’ll have to stick to dual booting.

2. If you do end up dual booting, DO NOT use your external HDD in NTFS to run games on linux. It will work for a while, but you’ll constantly have to ‘chkdsk’ or check disk on Windows every time your HDD is found corrupted. Also, NTFS is Windows’ proprietary filesystem. So, I’ve heard that using ntfs-fix (chkdsk equivalent on linux) might cause data loss. Not sure how far it’s true, but be cautious of using that too. But otherwise, I believe that just reading files from NTFS drive usually is not a problem.

• If you are NOT dual booting however, you won’t have to face this mess. You can backup the data on your HDD somewhere, format it in ‘ext4’ filesystem for Linux-only use (‘Exfat’ if you want to share any data with others on Windows/Mac) and restore all your files back to this HDD in ext4. Hope you have extra HDD with enough free space to move your files while you convert disks to ext4. You can also probably use cloud services for backup.

3. I’ve used Ubuntu, Mint, Arch and Fedora.

• Had faced a lot of issues with Ubuntu back in the day, and Snap Steam is a mess. So, avoid it.
• Mint is easy to use, removes snap from Ubuntu and just uses apt, has a great Desktop Environment called Cinnamon, and I’d usually recommend this to someone new, but I wanted to shift from X-11 to Wayland for security reasons and HDR support among others. If Wayland worked well with Mint, I’d still be using it today, but that was the only reason I moved away from it.
• While Arch is nice, it’s certainly not for someone new.
• That leaves us with Fedora KDE, which would be my recommendation. It has good security features like SE-Linux out of the box. The reason I suggest KDE over Gnome is so that you might have an easier transition from Windows to Linux. Once you have a hang of this, you can later use a pen drive to load other distro with other DE like Gnome, XFCE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, etc and test them out by live booting.

4. Speaking of pendrives, make sure to always have one with Ventoy installed and the distribution you’re using. This will be handy if you want to troubleshoot your system anytime. And I say Ventoy over others because it makes loading distro easier. You can just drag and drop the ISO files instead of having to burn with Balena Etcher or Rufus everytime.

• Rufus is great, but if you’re moving out of Windows, you don’t need it.
• And I have seen a lot of people have trouble with using Balena Etcher. So, avoid it.

5. • Turn off Secure Boot in BIOS. (And maybe also fast boot).

• And if your disk is on RAID instead of AHCI, you might have trouble installing. So, you might want to set your SATA configuration to AHCI mode in BIOS if you face issues.

6. If you end up choosing Fedora, you may want to follow this.

Fedora only comes with FOSS by default. So, you’ll have to install Nvidia driver and proprietary multimedia Codecs separately by including RPMFusion repo.

• You can download the free and non-free repo files from the RPM-Fusion site(Graphical Setup) and install them through the Software Center. After adding the repo, you might have to enable them in the Settings of Discover Software Center. Enable all of them except those containing the words ‘testing’, ‘Test’, ‘Source’, ‘Debug’ and ‘google chrome’.

• After that, it’s just a few lines you type in the terminal (Konsole by default) for installing driver and codecs. Make sure to update the system and restart first before doing these.

For Nvidia driver, type:

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia

For optional CUDA support, type:

sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

For Video acceleration support, type:

sudo dnf install nvidia-vaapi-driver libva-utils vdpauinfo

For Codecs, type:

sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

Steam is also included in the non-free repo. You may install it by typing:

sudo dnf install steam

7. Other than these, most applications can now be installed directly from the store as a Flatpak. You can select them in the store between Flatpaks, Fedora managed Flatpaks and Fedora Linux app for a particular one.

• For flatpak apps, you’ll see a tick next to the developer if they are verified. So, you can look out for that if necessary.
• Make sure ‘Flathub’ repo is enabled in the Settings of Discover Software Center for the Flatpak apps to appear.

NOTE: Every time the video driver updates, you will have to do a follow-on update for flatpak runtimes. You might see a bunch of ‘Application platform’ and ‘Freedesktop’ stuff which you’ll have to install. If you fail to do this, you might suddenly find flatpak applications not working properly.

8. Troubleshooting tips:

• If Steam doesn’t launch the first time, type:

__GL_CONSTANT_FRAME_RATE_HINT=3 steam

• If your system is frozen, try switching to TTY by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F3) and going back to GUI by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F2)*. *Could be F1 in some cases.

• To check what errors you got during the recent boot,

journalctl -b 0 -p err

Apart from the driver installation and some troubleshooting, you generally won’t have to use the terminal if you’re averse to it.

9. In terms of deGoogling, I’d recommend the following:

• Buy a pixel and install Graphene OS.

Switch to

• Tuta/Proton Mail for email,

• Proton/Tresorit Drive for storage,

• Mullvad (or i, proton) VPN or (Rethink DNS for firewall) I am not sure if you can use both Rethink and VPN at the same time. I assume there is a way.

• OsmAnd for maps,

• Newpipe for youtube frontend(Grayjay on Linux),

• Bitwarden/KeepassXC for Password management,

• Aegis for TOTP

• Fdroid, Accrescent, Aurora for App store.

• Molly FOSS for Messaging.

I dual boot Fedora KDE and Arch.

I’ve used Mint before and I’ve little to no qualms with it, but I wanted to move away from X-11, which has no GUI isolation. Hence the switch to Fedora, which has a smooth Wayland experience and also happens to have SELinux out-of-the-box.