Hi! You may be sick of these posts by now, but I have been having a very hard time selecting between three distros; that being OpenSUSE, Fedora, and Linux Mint. I have tried linux in the past, I did debian with cinnamon and ran into some issues, so I ended up sheepishly reinstalling windows and getting AME10. I want to give it another shot though, and I have settled on one of these three. I am an absolute beginner to linux and i’m a g*mer (laugh it up), so out of these which would be better? I don’t have too many preferences, I guess I would like to avoid CLI’s as much as possible but it’s not too much of a big deal. I could get used to it and learn the commands. If you can give a bit of advice, that’d be great and I appreciate all of you!
I’ve used Fedora, and I think it is not an easy distro for beginners, especially if you don’t know your way around the terminal. My experience with OpenSUSE was so-so, but I have a negative image for it not being vanilla enough. Linux Mint would be the right choice for you.
But given your political inclination, I’m assuming that you probably also might have strong feelings for Stallman’s philosophy of hardcore GPL adherance and disdain towards proprietary copyright ones and maybe even permissive copyleft licenses. None of the above distros are for GNU-purists, if you are interested in going all libre. But that path isn’t easy, as most drivers out there are proprietary.
One thing you need to understand - most of us don’t play games a lot, but rather into open source contributions. Personally, I like NixOS, but if I had the privilege to, I’d jump to Guix.
thank you for the insight!
What was so-so about your experience with OpenSUSE?
My experience with Tumbleweed was so weird - in the way that I never got to experience it properly. I was bummed with Nvidia drivers breaking after every new kernel update on Fedora, so I wanted to try something stable. This was around the time Leap came into existence. By the time Fedora was on GNOME 40, they were still on GNOME 3. There were a bunch of third party, non-vanilla apps, and I felt out of place. But that was just me trying out the live USB, and I thought to myself that I can make them Vanilla after I finish installing. Also, I didn’t care about the older GNOME version a lot. The biggest issue was me trying to install - the Tumbleweed installation never finished for me - I waited for more than three hours, thinking that maybe it has to do with a slow download speed. I tried using a bunch of other older release ISO, and it still had the same issue. I was tired of this, and went back to Fedora.