Nobody is trying to screw these fools.

This. Plus offline games. All the online micro transaction bullshit is pathetic.

Doing the lords work! 🫶

Up to date mesa is in regular mint but only sort of. You have to manually go bleeding edge if you want by installing mesa drivers manually. Base Mint is a few versions behind on purpose, stability and I would say your kernel version makes a bigger difference in the end given how good mint is I recommend 6.14 kernel especially on fresh hardware, you can change your kernel version anytime in the update manager preferences, 6.8 is old but stable. 6.14 is newer, faster in gaming. Unless your on brand new, brand new released hardware this a non issue truly.

Most people will be fine with stock mint and you can’t go wrong much with either. I game on stock mint full time! Windows only for BF6/dual boot. It’s all I knew for several years was mint before going to NIXos and fedora and more… My hardware is 7900xt 7600x. Full AMD on my rigs though I’ve built intel Nvidia… I’ve built dozens of PCs/laptops/servers as I build and sell them. You honestly can’t go wrong with either version but all I am saying is that if you hate bugs, updates ocassionally doing odd things especially to steam and proton. LMDE. I’ve been on mint for years this is just my 2 cents. I also value not fucking with my OS anymore I dislike command line memorization. I’m done tinkering and fixing shit all the time and prefer GUI or shit to just work ideally I’ll trouble shoot for a few minutes then I stop, no more days tied up over dumb shit. With windows or Linux. LMDE is my choice. Best of luck.

There are thousands of packages. Download off the internet and boot it. Just like a normal distro mostly. Nix is the single largest package manager even far surpassing arch and others. If they could refine the process it could be the end all be all right new to Debian and mint.

I’ve used nix for roughly a year. Flakes is the way to go. It’s the most simple cut and dry shit works distro aside from Linux mint but the caveat is you have to essentially learn how the nix config file works. You can install your configuration file on any machine, anytime, anywhere and it’ll boot as your exact carbon copy. Its a great distro you can trust to maintain with two files entirely. Cake to remember and backup.

Downsides are keeping config file backed up often. And knowing that anything you want done has to go into config document. I can answer any questions. I’m busy so I can’t type more.

I suggest LMDE not regular mint. Normal mint updates often and ocassionally with bugs while rare and mostly I see for gaming they do happen. Stability and reliability are king. So LMDE aka Linux mint debian edition. Its entirely the same as normal mint made by the same people but it’s rock solid unlike Ubuntu version.

Sincerely I’ve used both to game and daily pc usage even work. LMDE no questions.

So what the main hassle of switching is that you have to run your hardware file to update for your new hardware, then inside your Nix config rarely will I ever have to edit things (maybe UUIDS if totally new machine fresh nix install/but I usually ssd swap for ease of transition and speed, or even clonezilla multiple drives and use as needed) even drivers for example. I’ve got auto scripts setup to run that will automatically pull any drivers or updates from the base system nix update to any drivers.

There’s really only two files you ever have to touch that I’ve used. Nix hardware, nix config. Once hardware is updated for which system you on you’ll never touch that until you boot a new machine with different hardware. If you setup nix how it’s supposed to be. Nix config is your master file. A single backup of that and when setup correctly. I can boot like I never left my machine. I’m talking librewolf still has my accounts open and logged in. VPN works. It’s all seamless damn near.

You have to learn to play within nixos sandbox meaning understand what your capable of doing and do it all inside config. With a few auto scripts, and 3 or 4 common commands on desktop page for whatever you wanna do and its terminal and memory hands off. I’ve what I call dumb Monkey commented my entire config and its in order if boot process from power on machine to boot, etc to shutdown.

A regular distro still poses many many more challenges when hardware swapping. You have different files to remember fstab, etc etc which can lead to mental memory load and system clutter if you didn’t build and maintain a perfect system from the beginning with stuff like files, sym links, all sorts if tweaks you’ve made over time.

So I switched to nix to mitigate those things. Now I’ve made a master config file copy, auto updates, backups, etc is all automated in the background now. All contained in my nix config. It’s supremely stable. Mental load is zero. Fills my use case. Immutable.

You have nothing to lose and only to gain. Pick any desktop environment and setup to your liking. I came from windows, to mint, to full custom nix all my apps, browsers, luks, apparmour, firejail, the whole stack.

I’ve tried live boots of many other distributions but this is the cleanest, leanest, most manageable of them all. My only true concern is project lasting long-term. For now. Aside from not having GUFW. I’m happy. I think there’s just a lot if misinfo and lack of hands on use from most people or incorrectly setup systems to utilize how nix should be ran. I think that should iron out over time.

I’m always on the go, swapping PCs, travelling for medical reasons. Buy, sell, trade hardware. Nix allows me to boot into my system as if I never left with a simple hardware config update script. Rock solid consistency.