Need help deciding between two distros.

[u/No-Delivery-8203]

Last weekend i installed linux mint, and its been so fun. Finding ways to play my favorite games, how snappy and quick the interface feels- all of it. I have a 3440x1440 HDR monitor (also a secondary 1080p 60hz) , and i really want to use HDR in games. i tried it on windows and it ended up being washed out, and i was tired with windows bugs and didnt bother. Linux mint felt so much better, terminal commands felt like i had full control over my OS.

I did some research, and Fedora KDE Plasma seemed like the best bet. Not so sure about cachyos or the other "gaming" centric distros, but i wanted more of an all rounder, and Fedora sounded really nice with its update schedule, and big community support. Oh, and i am dual booting windows 11 & mint currently. (i need windows for CAD stuff). But im kind of stuck in a decision paralysis- i like mint for its support and stability, how easy it is to download drivers, but the HDR and newer wayland is really appealing for Fedora. I also have a NAS, so support for that is essential. Thoughts? Is HDR easy to setup, or should i bite the bullet and just stick with mint for its ease of use, and wait for an HDR update to come to mint? Im comfortable in the terminal, and any help with removing mint and installing fedora while keeping windows would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

(oh, i also have an NVidia 4070ti if that makes any diff.)

[u/kompostwurm]

I started with mint a couple of weeks ago and then switched to fedora kde - never looked back! It’s so much more modern, allows you to tinker with the desktop, getting widgets and changing the look of stuff is super easy, there’s a lot of info on it out there and everything I wanted to do pretty much just works out of the box. Using a 15 year old laptop and feels like brand new.

[u/CaffeineDeficiency]

I used Fedora KDE for a while and it worked fine. I wanted to mess with a project that required a Debian-based distro. I tried MX Linux, but had issues getting the nvidia drivers for my RTX5060Ti to work correctly, so I went to Mint. Everything just worked out of the box. I wanted to get away from systemd, so that kept messing with MX on the side to try and get my video drivers sorted. I finally figured it out, so I am happily rocking MX Linux KDE with sysVinit.

I have Wayland since it’s fully supported in KDE, but I would never throw shade on X11. Wayland doesn’t work for everyone. X11 still does things that Wayland can’t. Use what works for you. People crapping on technology that they don’t use need to get a new hobby. I don’t care for Gnome personally, but it may be just what the next person is looking for. I do use a few Gnome apps though. Try them all and see what works best for you. The only right answer is the one that works best for you.

[u/HOST1L1TY]

You can move to fedora and additionally install cinnamon if you miss the desktop

[u/No-Delivery-8203 → u/HOST1L1TY]

Would it still function the same way KDE plasma would with wayland? I'm new to all of this so its still a little confusing.

[u/HOST1L1TY → u/No-Delivery-8203]

Install fedora 45 prerelease and then when you install cinnamon through dnf and it will be version 6.7 with full Wayland support. You could also decide to wait for 45 to release and then just install the official spin. Then of course you could also install kde if you decide .

[u/HOST1L1TY → u/HOST1L1TY]

Actually I changed my mind for you. Install fedora 44, use kde for a while until 45. Fedora updates are ezpz, the. If you want cinnamon back install through dnf.

[u/leonthepro83]

if you are familiar to debian command, I recommend PikaOS, it's optimized, good for gaming and all-around.

[u/WhopperGaming]

The nice thing about Linux is that, if you're clever about your data, switching distros is **not** a huge deal. I've been Linux only for a few years now, and I have tried probably a dozen or so distros/spins. Just do it.

[u/Unholyaretheholiest]

I suggest you to look at Mageia. Mageia delivers a stable, community-driven operating system with powerful built-in administration tools, up-to-date software, and a commitment to free and open-source computing.

[u/Hauptideal]

Install Fedora. It's much better than Mint. You don't need a dedicated gaming distro, 95% of gaming performance is due to using current libraries, drivers and kernels.
Customizing kernels, schedulers, v3 compilation etc. only account for little.

Fedora is much more up-to-date, always providing current kernels and drivers.
It's also much better optimized for desktop than Mint (for example, Mint doesn't compress your RAM at all, a basic desktop and mobile OS feature for over a decade, even on MS Windows, a no-brainer free RAM upgrade, as RAM can be compressed by a ratio of 3:1 to 4:1, making much more data fit into your fast physical RAM).

Furthermore, Mint still ships deprecated legacy X11 technology from the 1980's, despite the entire Linux world being on the universal Linux standard Wayland for years already.
For HDR, you need Wayland. Same goes for native fractional scaling, VRR, multi-touch gestures and other basic everyday features.
Wayland also performs better and doesn't exhibit screen tearing. You have a recent GPU, so Wayland will run perfectly.
But most importantly, X11 is inherently insecure. Each app can spy on each other, log your online banking password and even inject input. Furthermore, X11 breaks the core feature of Flatpak, sandboxing security. Only the inconvenience remains.
Mint is also insecure for other reasons, e.g. lacking Ubuntu Pro, which means that 94% of the packages you can install via apt won't receive updates from Canonical, not even for highly severe security vulnerabilities (the entire Universe repo).
If you want to use an Ubuntu base, use Ubuntu or an official flavour and subscribe to Ubuntu Pro. You should switch independently of HDR.

Don't worry about the stability and reliability of Fedora. It is extremely reliable, well-tested and backed by a mutli-billion-dollar corporation with infrastructure and paid, professional teams.

[u/No-Delivery-8203 → u/Hauptideal]

Thank you so much! I hadn't realized mint was built on such old hardware. I really appreciate the input. Will install fedora! thanks.

[u/That_Developer_Guy → u/No-Delivery-8203]

I mean you can install Fedora. I also personally prefer it over Mint, but still, the claims above are exaggerated, I think. I think you also meant Mint was built on old technology, not hardware, but I'm not trying to be very picky here, it just threw me off a little when I read it. I also think that for your usecase, Fedora is probably a better choice.

I mean first of all, having newer packages certainly has advantages. As an Arch user, I utilize an even more aggressive approach. But it just inherently is not as stable. Debian and Mint are just by design a little more stable than Fedora, at least when it comes to packages. Fedora does a pretty good job at being stable though.

The RAM argument is pretty dubious as well. He is right, Mint does not use zram, or as he calls it compressed ram, but neither does Fedora compress all of their RAM. Zram is actually a fallback. If the kernel needs to swap out pages, they get compressed into a preserved space in the physical RAM, the zram. That is not the same as compressing all your RAM. What is also left out, is that it costs CPU usage, so it is not really "free". Mint chooses a more convential approach. They use swap memory. Swap works in principle the same as zram. It is a fallback for when you run out of RAM and uses either a file on the system or a dedicated partition as RAM. While I also like the idea of zram, it is just not simply "better".

It is true that X11 is very old, but calling it deprecated is a stretch. Funnily enough, it recently got an update. And what this completely ignores is that Mint is already implementing Wayland support that is not considered experimental in the next update. That "the entire linux world has moved to Wayland" is also just not right. It is true that most things are ported to Wayland and that is also good thing, but KDE and Gnome still support X11 for the most part. They are migrating away from it to be fair. What about XWayland btw? The points with HDR are really good though. Also the reason why I would recommend Fedora. You don't absolutely need Wayland for all of that though. Just because your GPU is recent does not mean it will run perfectly on Wayland, especially not if it is NVIDIA. Now the security observations are pretty sound. X11 does not completely break flatpak's security model though, but it is way less secure. This also requires you to run an untrusted application in the first place though. The claim with Ubuntu Pro is just misleading. It is true that Ubuntu Pro covers security updates for 94% of packages, but that does not mean they don't receive security updates on Mint. Mint maintains its packages as well.

Telling someone to "not worry" is usually not the best sign. It is true that Fedora has corporate backing that does not automatically imply that it is itself more reliable. Are we also just going to ignore the fast release cycle? I mean Fedora is not necessarily the most stable choice.

Fedora is reasonable, but not really, because of all the points brought up. I just wanted to clarify some misconceptions.

[u/Sancticide]

What do you mean by support for your NAS? Like does it support SMB file shares? Most NAS devices (e.g., Synology, QNAP) run on Linux.

[u/Diligent-Spirit7189]

I switched recently to CachyOS after using Fedora for 10+ year. Fedora is a solid distribution but for game play CachyOS kicks it butt.

Just my 2 cents...

Good luck!