Over the years in search of a daily driver, I’ve done Ubuntu > Pop > Kubuntu > Mint > more distro hopping > Mint.

It’s nice living on the beach. 😎

I think starting with the DE is solid advice. I remember using Ubuntu with Unity many, many moons ago and being put off by the DE, which ultimately delayed my move to desktop Linux. Then I tried Kubuntu and was like, ah, I didn’t know it could be this good. Finally, I tried Mint with Cinnamon and was hooked.

After years of distro hopping, I always come back to Mint. It’s just a nice balance of everything, though I do tweak it with a bit of a custom setup using btrfs with LUKS and grub-btrfs so I can boot from automated Timeshift snapshots if I accidentally jack something up.

Appreciate it! I’ll keep this in mind if hopping to Bazzite doesn’t magically fix it.

Oh, that’s interesting. I’m assuming my cheap mini PC is using an obscure built-in BT chipset that may not be well supported on Linux. It may actually be the controllers themselves, though no issues on SteamOS. I suppose a dongle that can be unplugged and reconnected to mitigate the issue would at least be an improvement over a built-in chipset with this problem.

Something like a Steam Deck or Steam Machine that “just works” is definitely worthwhile.

I recently bought a cheap mini PC with a 780M for like $380. It’s 2x the GPU power of a Steam Deck but probably half the GPU power of a Steam Machine (likely half the price too).

Anyhow, it’s running Mint and my XBox controllers randomly disconnect. I’ve spent a few hours troubleshooting with no success so far, and my next steps are buy a USB Bluetooth dongle and see if that works or switch to Bazzite. On the other hand, I never had any problems like this with my Steam Deck. I also don’t use Steam and use Lutris instead, which sometimes requires time spent troubleshooting and jacking around with dependencies / GE Proton versions / etc., whereas Steam games would “just work”.

It’s worth the extra time to me to avoid Steam’s data collection and to be able to run alternative versions of games without DRM that I can run semi-sandboxed in the Flatpak version of Lutris with network permissions revoked so the games can’t collect data either. However, I certainly understand people not giving a shit about any of that and just wanting something that works with no trouble.

Sounds about like the techbros. Tech isn’t there yet, but let’s deploy it anyway and start making money.