2026-10-18 18:49 UTC
Replies (30)
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@TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml 2026-10-18 18:59
Add the nvidia apt repository and install the drivers.
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@Kyrias@lemmy.ca 2026-10-18 19:00
I went Garuda and I’m happy. If you like tinkering and tech go Cachy. If you just want things to work go Ubuntu.
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@DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 2026-10-18 19:27
CachyOS or Ubuntu? With all due respect to Ubuntu, but this isn’t even a comparison. I’d try to give you a fair answer if you’d stated Garuda, for example, or Nobara, or Bazzite instead of Ubuntu, because these distros actually put in an effort for gaming specifically, but Ubuntu? It’s a workstation distro and it’s gaming performance is basically whatever the default is on “Linux” as a whole. I have personally been using CachyOS for over two years now and I’ve been very happy with it. Their installer recognizes your gpu automatically and installs the right drivers for you. Not to take away from the other ones, I’m sure they have amazing work/performance, too, but this is my experience because I’ve tried all of the distros I’ve mentioned above and CachyOS was the best for me personally. Your mileage may vary of course. The best thing to do is try different distros and find out for yourself. Make sure your data is backed up while you hop between them until you chose one.
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@maya_s_trojan@piefed.blahaj.zone 2026-10-18 19:31
What are your PC specs outside of an Nvidia card? Depending on your specs, it might make more sense to run it in a Virtual Machine than dual boot. I started my process of going into Linux with dual-booting for several years while also running a small linux server on a raspberry pi 3B+ The reality is I hardly ever booted into Linux unless I needed to do something over there. Several times I ignored the Linux side long enough that it was fully broken from not reviving updates for so long. (Literally slept on the upgrade window until the next upgrade was already out and the old upgrade window was gone…ooof. after that I went with LTS just to ensure that didn’t happen again). Part of the reason I never booted into it is because turning it off and then on again… is actually more time consuming and interruptive than you initially think. I would just forget it was there on a normal day without any specific projects to work on. I never really took it properly seriously until I fully removed Windows and made my Linux my daily driver. If I still need Windows, I run that in a Virtual Machine. However the amount of times I need it is steadily decreasing. So, based on personal experience, if you have the specs, I strongly suggest a VM otherwise you might find yourself not even bothering to boot into Linux half the time because everything you do daily is still on Windows. Just a thought nugget to consider. Plenty of people told me I should be running mine in a VM that whole time, too. I was skeptical. Looking back, they were right, and it took me longer to acclimate than it would have if I had been consistently using it.
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@bigfish@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-10-18 19:39
Go Nobara. It just works, with hardly any configuration needed, and is kept remarkably up to date with its updater alone.
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@patruelis@lemmy.world 2026-10-18 19:59
You cant really go wrong. I would try Baazite.
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@muhyb@programming.dev 2026-10-18 20:02
Addition to other comments, you can also try your chance by installing Steam as flatpak. Maybe that would work without you needing a second distro. For DaVinci Resolve, you can try this: www.danieltufvesson.com/makeresolvedeb
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@Pissio@lemmy.world 2026-10-18 19:10
Catchy and then Arch when you learned 👍
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@aReallyCrunchyLeaf@lemmy.ml 2026-10-18 21:06
IMO Fedora can do everything that Ubuntu does, without snap or the opinionated Cannonical stuff, it’s an easy GUI installer, has better defaults (except you need to manually add non-fre repos, trivial), and wide software compatibility. You can’t go wrong with Fedora unless you specifically hate having up to date software or major updates every 6-12 months. Cachy is a fine distro too I guess. I’d probably use EndeavorOS instead if you want an arch but are afraid to install it, but I don’t like distros which have opinions, I prefer a clean slate. At that point I’d just roll Arch, it’s like 12 commands. Nothing to fear.
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@merde@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-18 21:48
i’m not on CachyOS, but whenever i asked how somebody got a game to work on linux, the response was Cachy. I’m on Artix and Debian. Like you wrote, it’s impossible to get some games to run on Debian based distributions (i don’t care enough about games, so i won’t be changing my OS Ubuntu is Debian based. Won’t be any better than LMDE. Endeavour won’t give you anything basic Arch can’t. Cachy’s modified for gaming, iiuc. If i had to reinstall on our desktop today, i would go with Cachy.
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@Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-10-18 21:53
This isn’t an important choice. If you don’t like the distro or you are having issues, it’s like 10 minutes to switch to a different one. That being said, I would not recommend Ubuntu for a variety of reasons. CachyOS is a great option, but there are others. Just try it, if you have issues or don’t like it, try something else.
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@mrnngglry@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-18 23:32
I’m not a programmer either. Never have been. You don’t need to be one to use any desktop distro. You’d be fine with CachyOS. It is popular enough that getting help with anything that does pop up should be easy. I’ve used it as well as Nobara and Bazzite. Ultimately, I landed on Bazzite. That was about a year ago and I am happy.
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@TrippinMallard@lemmy.ml 2026-10-18 23:58
Have you tried kdenlive? youtu.be/9dIqJDy78TI
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@FBJimmy@lemmus.org 2026-10-19 00:28
I can’t really tell you what will work for you, but I took a similar starting path… When I finally took linux seriously as my Primary OS a few years ago, I too picked LMDE, and generally thought it was good. I eventually moved on because I wanted access to newer stuff like Nvidia drivers. My next distro was Fedora KDE Edition, and.tjis would be my generic recommendation for anyone coming from Windows. Rolling updates isn’t scary, actually it means you don’t have a terrifying big upgrade looming on the horizon. About a year ago I started hand-crafting my own Hyprland on Arch setup. It’s great. Bleeding edge stuff, and contrary to the memes it’s actually been the easiest to maintain - possibly because I only have the packages I need. BUT I wouldn’t recommend this for someone without a software engineering background. I also dabbled withe EndeavourOS which deserves a shout.
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@panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2026-10-19 02:26
I would throw bazzite in as an option, especially for a new user. Bazzite has a good out of the box experience, is meant for gaming, and it uses an immutable distro. In my opinion the only reason people don’t like immutable distros is bad habits that are hard to break, or wanting highly custom system configurations, both do not apply to a new user. If you never go into the terminal there’s no difference, and if you do a system like brew works pretty well. For just gaming and desktop use (with KDE), it’s a good low maintenance system.
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@mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-19 04:00
Seeing as you have an Nvidia card, I’d caution against Ubuntu. People talk about how “stable” it is, but it’ll break on it’s own even if you don’t try to update it, and it’s all because of Nvidia drivers. I recommend getting a distro that has the Nvidia drivers baked it, which mostly narrows it down to Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS, or Pop!OS. I’m personally not a fan of Pop! since it’s based on Debian. I personally use Nobara right now since it’s essentially Bazzite if it weren’t immutable. It’s OK. It does some things well and has some headaches. I recently had to dual-boot CachyOS alongside Nobara. I haven’t had much time to tinker with it, but it’s definitely different. But one big benefit to Cachy is that you can pick whatever desktop environment and bootloaders you want. Just pick the correspondjng option in the installer. At the end of the day, Bazzit, Nobara, and Cachy all have the same gaming-focusses system optimizations. It just boils down to specifics from there
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@HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 2026-10-19 04:49
Caution, dual-boot means you have to power down your system before you can start the other, if you share any file systems. Hibernate and then booting another distro will result in file system damage. The alternative would be a virtual machine. It can also occasionally mess up the grub configuration, which means you have to reinstall grub.
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@LewdLemon@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-19 04:51
If you war a good first Linux experience, stick with anything Ubuntu-/Debian-based; they are stable workhorses, i.e. they don’t break on you as easily as rolling release distros like CachyOS. wildly popular, i.e. you’ll find plenty of resources to help you get started (although, to be fair, the Arch wiki is also ridiculously detailed). Whatever you do, steer clear of immutable distros like Bazzite for now. As cool as the concept is (I run Bazzite on my gaming machine) - as soon as you do something “non-standard” (and modding your Minecraft .jar with Optifine already qualifies as such), you’ll have to fiddle with the terminal and distrobox containers, both of which will be alien concepts for you at the start and may be top much to make it a good first impression.
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@DrunkenDuckling@lemmus.org 2026-10-19 04:53
Between these two, Cachy. If choice is open: Fedora.
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@mbp@lemmy.sdf.org 2026-10-19 04:57
Might just be my old experience (happy to learn otherwise) but dual booting ended up with more of a painful experience than not. When Windows would update, it would fuck my grub up and cause issues booting into Linux and Windows. You can fix it (most of the time) but expect to do it rather often; especially unpleasant as a beginner. I know there’s issues with GPU passthrough on vms but IDK if dual booting is the moves unless they seriously improved the experience in the last couple years.
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@SwooshBakery624@programming.dev 2026-10-19 05:03
In my opinion vanilla Fedora is the best beginner distro. And once you fell comfortable with Linux you can try Arch, CashyOS, rpm-ostree based distros or anything else.
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@Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-10-19 07:49
Try Debian, nut ubuntu, it just makes problems
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@SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 2026-10-19 12:47
Hm… LMDE is Debian under the hood, so if you have non standard requirements then you have to be flexible to make something to work, combining .deb repositories with other solutions like flatpaks, distrobox, compiling from source, nix, guix, appimages, etc. Just don’t mess with system directories and libraries and you’re good. Maybe Mint were a better choice to a newbie, but in the end it’s almost the same thing with some nice driver utilities. Look for the release in December.
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@dreamy@lemmy.ml 2026-10-19 14:27
Definitely Fedora. It needs a bit of setting up, but otherwise has awesome security and rather recent packages.
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@emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-19 15:26
Install Ubuntu and see if you can get your games and video editing software to work. If you can’t, go for CachyOS. Why Ubuntu first? Because millions of people have been using it for years. When something breaks, you’ll be able to fix it because someone else would have already encountered this issue before and reported it.
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@Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-19 17:11
My experience with Ubuntu desktop has always been a real poor one but I realize other people like it. I’d go with cachy or endevourOS personally. My wife has probably less technical skill than you do and I’ve had her on endevourOS for nearly a year at this point. All she does is YouTube and gaming and it all runs near flawlessly. I also have both our systems dual booted but I also can’t remember the last time I booted into windows for either machine.
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@Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 2026-10-19 18:24
Between those two, CachyOS for sure. You are already running LMDE, imo there is zero benefit to dual-booting with Ubuntu… You are likely going to be running into the exact same problems you already are.
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@Horsey@lemmy.world 2026-10-19 18:42
The biggest problem with Linux distros is choice paralysis. I’d recommend Fedora/(K/X)Ubuntu/Mint as a first choice. Fedora is very up to date, so if you’re giddy to try new desktop environment updates (like gnome, KDE, not Cosmic until it’s more mature), then go Fedora with the spin you think you’ll like the most, visually. Ubuntu is updated all at once every year/2 years or so. By the time an update reaches Ubuntu, it’s already old news. It’s much more stable because there’s less to diagnose, and everything is essentially worked out before it hits your PC. Mint is Ubuntu, but heavily modified with user friendly changes in mind. From what I’ve seen though, the default theme is really dated, visually, and may not have creature comforts (I haven’t used mint in over a decade). Bazzite is for you if you are afraid to brick your computer with a stray terminal command; it’s designed to be very resilient to beginner mistakes. CachyOS/Endevour (Arch based) are great distros, but you’ll be given a laundry list of choices for everything from your web browser, desktop environment, terminal, shell, file browser, and more. If you’re new to Linux, there’s simply too much choice for things you understand yet. Even if you’re into customization, you’re better off trying one of the above as a baseline and going down the customization rabbit hole from there!
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@BlueberryWalnut@sopuli.xyz 2026-10-19 20:58
Debian stable. You’ll be fine.
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@tigerjerusalem@lemmy.world 2026-10-23 15:25
I’m was between CachyOS and Bazzite and decided for Bazzite for being a more stable and hassle free OS from what I read, because it’s not a rolling distro with frequent updates that may break something. I went all in, deleting my Windows partition and am pretty happy with it ao far. I do have Affinity and Concepts that are windows only and I’m using VirtualBox for those.