this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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I'd say Bazzite but I would warn him (and since he's a developer already it might not be a big deal) if he's looking to do any sort of dev work or whatever with Bazzite then prepare to utilize stuff like distrobox, flatpaks, etc to accomplish stuff like that.
That being said as a dev and gamer myself if my first linux experience was Bazzite I might get annoyed. Mint is a great first experience. when I originally tried it well over a year ago though I did have issues with my Nvidia GPU on it and gaming wasn't super great BUT it's been awhile since I've used mint so that may have changed.
Honestly I would suggest start with Mint and just drive it for a couple weeks. If he likes it but feel it's limited for some things then that's when he can expand out to different distros. And like I said maybe gaming on Mint has improved since I last used it. But if he's comfortable with running distrobox and containers then Bazzite is fine.
That's what I figured, I would be very annoyed to have to use images for software I would simply do an apt install for in other distros, so I'll leave out Bazzite from my options definitely
Bazzite has a developer edition OS image
If he's a dev, he might actually prefer it. Just explain and let him decide which one he wants to try first.
And then when he try actually tries it everything breaks and he spends hours trying to get udev working from a distrobox container.
Why would it break?
Sorry, I mean "it simply doesn't work".
You might just want to recommend fedora with the caveat that he'll need to do a little setup with drivers. Bazzite and nobara are both fedora distros.
So, all downstreams have no added value?
That's not what I said. My experience with nobara personally hasn't been great and while I use bazzite at home for gaming PC but wouldn't recommend it at this moment because it seems that the dev team is having some drama. I use cachy daily and find it wonderful and super easy. Not the arch difficulty that I was expecting. It's a downstream.