That true, though most of the results for Linux Mint slow boot show people finding it anomalous and try to help fix it, where as with Bazzite, most of the comments say that’s normal and they experience it too. The consensus I’ve seen suggests that Fedora Atomic boots slower than other distros, and thus Bazzite inherits that slow boot as well.

I’m not trying to suggest that Bazzite sucks or anything, it provides some very unique advantages such as the Deck mode, but at least in my experience, Fedora based immutable distros are slower on my hardware. If it’s not on yours, then I’m glad to hear that, but it its been very repeatable on my end.

Yeah I dunno about all that.

That’s been my experience across a couple different computers, one of which was a bit weak, and the other a very capable gaming laptop, both of which just felt sluggish compared to normal distros. This appears to be a fairly common observation of Bazzite, from what I’ve seen.

Bazzite isn’t limited, there are just different ways to do things.

I mostly agree, but I’d say it generally requires more research to accomplish certain things, and documentation for achieving those things on bazzite is far more limited compared to mainstream distros. I think Bazzite excels for people either doing simple things, such as just couch gaming, or desktop gaming + browser use and if everything is available by Flathub. It’s also good for people who are more experienced or willing to tinker.

But IMHO, at least currently, immutable distros aren’t ideal for the average user who might do more than gaming, or have older printers than need a driver from the manufacturer, or who may install things that aren’t in flatpaks (like a musician using Reaper). I think for now (because I do think immutable distros will be the mainstream in the future), normal newbie distros like Mint are still ideal since they cover the most use-cases and have the most documentation and application support.

No prob! :)

I’d normally suggest installing it on a separate empty drive to test it out, but I know it can be a real bear to access those to swap em out on a laptop.

In your case though, I think as long as you can get a Live version of Mint to boot successfully from a USB stick (like there’s no flickering issues at the desktop and everything renders correctly), that’s usually a pretty good sign everything will be fine after you install the Nvidia driver on a full install (not to say you 100% won’t encounter any issues, it’s still possible, but hopefully not!)

I tried looking it up myself just now, but I’m not really able to find anything that would indicate you’d have a bad time on Mint with your 5070 TI. There was one guy on the Nvidia forum that said he was having a bunch of problems, but turned out his BIOS was the culprit. Another person who reported a problem on the mint forums discovered that his card was outputting to his secondary monitor which happened to be off.

Support for the 5070ti was added in the 6.1 Linux kernel, while the latest version of Mint defaults to 6.12 now. You should be able to install it and then install the latest 580 Nvidia driver from the Driver Installer tool and be off to the races without any real trouble, at least from what I read.

System 76 (Linux laptop maker) now ships a laptop with a 5070 Ti, so I’d be quite surprised if you encountered significant issues.

Then I would suggest the standard Linux Mint Cinnamon, which as I said makes it extremely easy to install the Nvidia driver.

Off the top of my head,

• installing applications that aren’t available as flatpaks requires you to use distrobox to install them (not a huge issue if you’re familiar with the terminal).
• printer drivers are very difficult to install if your printer isn’t supported out if the box, as they cannot be installed in a distrobox container.
• changing user groups or permissions, such as to enable ssh or ftp abilities, is more difficult (it wouldn’t retain the setting after rebooting, didn’t research how it can be achieved).
• not a limitation, but it’s much slower in many ways compared to normal distros. It takes a long time for it to finish installing, booting is slower, updating is slower, etc.

There may be more limitations, but those are the ones I personally encountered.

I wouldn’t recommend CachyOS to newbies, as it’s based on Arch, which brings with it a much higher learning curve and maintenance abilities to properly use. For all of that, it gives very, very minor performance gains in gaming compared to standard distros.

Bazzite is more viable for a newbie, but the immutable base can be limiting depending on their needs, and may require them to learn how to use distrobox, which is quite advanced for a newbie.

I’d recommend new users stick with Linux Mint unless they have a multimonitor setup with differing refresh rates, or very new hardware that requires a newer kernel to function well, in which case Fedora may be a better option.

Linux Mint is a fantastic place to start (I would say the best place, personally). It’s especially good if you use an Nvidia card, as it makes the driver install trivial with the built-in driver installer tool.

If you don’t use an Nvidia card, I’d personally recommend going with the Linux Mint Debian Edition.

If you really want to freak Microsoft out, switch to Linux. Nothing terrifies them more than the moment you decide to leave.