that should be their mission statement.

Use Debian. No good reason to change.

Debian gaming wasn’t great when a lot of the landscape was changing (around 2016?) and even one of my very Debian friendly colleagues switched his gaming machine to Arch back then because getting the new stuff like AMD Vulkan drivers and DXVK running was really hard on Debian. Don’t think he migrated that particular machine back since then.

Snaps do suck, but from a usability standpoint, you really can’t ignore the fact that 99% of documentation assumes deb, and Ubuntu is generally more up to date than pure Debian. I don’t like it myself, but it works and it’s better than Windows.

I use Ubuntu for ROS and work specific tasks, but I get the fuck out when I want to game. Ubuntu looks like a job to me. Just like Windows looks like a job to me.

But the thing is, that’s just me. Can’t imagine being mad at someone else for using it, but Ubuntu makes me irrationally mad because it’s associated to work.

Where does fluxbuntu come in?

as long as you purge snaps off, its fine.

I quite like Kubuntu with the Snap-free minimal install. That said, Snaps are so bad and Canonical’s repos are so dangerous that I cannot recommend it to anyone any more. It’s a shame how greed has ruined Ubuntu.

I’m fairly new to using Linux, is there an Ubuntu for every letter of the alphabet?

Same. Tried bazzite, works fine, but immutable was annoying me for things like getting openvpn3 working (or anything involving more direct kernel stuff). Still use bazzite on my kid’s pc and my laptop but switched to fedora for my desktop and it’s been just right.

Ubuntu and Canonical can fuck allllllll the way off. If I had to go back to a dpkg based distro it’d have to be Debian bleeding edge… and honestly I’d probably bite the bullet and try Arch instead just because of Debian’s release lag.

I think the whole works part is the most important part, Linux can be janky (and by that I mean obsolete information and deprecated or outdated packages are often recommended and there are a thousand different ways to do anything with only one of them actually working (don’t have an aneurysm)) on the best of days, If something just works you can change what you want later.

I use arch, btw

Bazzite over Nobara, IMO.

I landed on Mint because it’s a simple no fuss distro that feels familiar to Windows refugees. I game on it just fine and use my computer for a lot of things so wanted something general. I bounced off Ubuntu because it has some decisions that are trying to protect you from actually learning Linux, which is a priority to me.

As a professional spreadsheet pusher, I can confidently say that LibreOffice (the Linux version of MS Office) has been able to do everything I needed that word/excel can, and then some.

But really any distro will be able to install the software you need, and it’s easy to switch. Just try it and have fun.

I’m not familiar with the above distros, but I’m pretty certain there’s more people on Ubuntu which helps a lot with troubleshooting and finding solutions online. One option is, when installing any Linux OS, is to create a separate partition for “home/”. that way, you can reinstall any other Linux based OS, and keep most of your files installed.

Excel doesn’t work on Linux, but LibreOffice and Google sheets do.

The main reason why I would steer newcomers away from the likes of Bazzite or Nobara is because I don’t think they’re going to last long. CachyOS has sprung up just as I was starting to hear less and less about Nobara. They get trendy as THE distro for newbies to install because it has a gimmick or two aimed at newcomers, which will inevitably get rolled into the mainstream, fixed, rendered obsolete or otherwise dealt with in the mainstream within a couple years anyway, then it’s off to the next one.

Who here remembers PeppermintOS being the hottest thing?

From what I understand, it’s still an excellent choice. It’s well supported and decent for new users.

Can you look into if the online version of Excel works for your wife? That might simplify your install. Libre Office and OnlyOffice are decent alternatives, but they might not map 1:1 with the instructions she gets from school.

Setting up qemu is easy, vm that opens the apps as windows so it seems native while running off a vm works well with cpu based stuff

I thought I saw something that the bazzite project might end once Fedora moves away from the 32 bit packages:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/06/bazzite-would-shut-down-if-fedora-goes-ahead-with-removing-32-bit/

Those distros are fine, I haven’t heard anything bad about them. The only distros I wouldn’t recommend are Ububtu and Manjaro (I can explain why if you want).

About Excel, it doesn’t work on Linux unfortunately. But you have some options. You can try LibreOffice and OpenOffice (you can install them on Windows to try them out before switching) and see if they’re enough for your needs. There’s also a web version of Excel which you can use in your browser but it doesn’t have all the features. If you really need Excel, you can also try using a virtual machine with Windows and run it inside of that but dual booting might be easier for you at that point.

I usually get downvoted for this since it’s not open source, but WPS Office is free and basically an exact ms office clone. I use it regularly moving files between my work laptop with windows

Bazzite is an immutable distro, and it expects you to install all your programs through containers. Not all software works with these containers, but like 99.9999% does. I’m a weirdo who wants the deepest of hardware monitoring tools and many of them don’t work with these containers. I haven’t used Nobara yet but it doesn’t appear to be immutable and based on regular Fedora so it shouldn’t have those issues.

excel

It may run through wine, and I’d test that out before fully committing. Worst case if that’s the ONLY thing you need you could do a VM. But would the cloud (web) version of office work for her? If you’re already paying for office 365 then I believe you get it included.

Honestly, most people keep a Windows partition anyway. I have one for Fusion 360 which intermittently stops working in Bottles.

Nothing wrong with them, surely better than Ubuntu, despite the meme.

I went from Nobara to Bazzite and it feels way more polished, although the immutable thing may not be for everyone

I’ve had Bazzite break its own update utility such that it needed manual intervention at least 3 times now. I see no point in a “just works” distro that doesn’t actually just work.

Both are great, as is Fedora, the one that both are based on.

Nobara had some issues updating correctly for me, but I haven’t seen anyone else express that, so I don’t think it’s a common thing.

Bazzite is really gaming focused, so it’s harder to do general purpose computing on it than a desktop OS.

But they are both great OSes, and really you should just try out a bunch of them and pick the one you like the most. They’re free after all.

I’ve had a much better experience with OnlyOffice compared to LibreOffice in terms of MS compatibility, and it’s a Flatpak so it should have no issues running under Bazzite.

Bazzite is fantastic, but because the system is immutable, you can’t just install packages like you can with other distros. This makes it very stable and very secure, but it also means you need to take extra steps if you want to get creative with your system. If you are already familiar with Docker and containers, then you can do anything you want that way, if there isn’t already a flatpak available. As a last resort, you can also use rpm-ostree to create new layers, but if you go that route you need to understand how to use ostree since eventually you will need to fix those layers manually.

What does the Oracle say today?

A man of God surrounded by heathens

Certified UNIX for the win.

big slur