Linux

I'd say avoid Wayland for now. There's no real benefit to it at the moment and at least your card works with X11. If the Linux Mint team are happy to wait and just test it out at the moment, that tells me that is the way to go.

Not sure what bloat people mentioned but Linux doesn't have bloat. The distro chooses their preferred apps which they hope everyone will like but it's easy to remove them if you don't and use the app you want. If it's a system app (.deb, rpm etc) it will barely take up any space anyway. Only flatpaks and snaps take up huge amount of space. I wouldn't recommend using alot of those as you'll be pressed for disk space

Linux doesn't require maintenance. It typically just works. It's not like Windows where you run a cleaner every so often. Just just use it normally and don't work about it.

What I wish I knew at the start: Linux Mint is the best distro. I wasted a lot of time distro hopping only to realise I just want a stable distro that gets out of the way but is thoughtfully put together with nice touches. Mint is that. I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I don't like canonical.

It's been rock solid except for when the kernel broke my WiFi, but I had a time shift backup so in 5 minutes I had my pre-update system back and working.

No, no, none, no, learn vim.

You might find something that works better or worse in Wayland, it’s not really a big deal

Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?

Both, the little things don’t matter but you can fill up your resources with bloat if you wanted.

Any habits or standards that I should abide by in order to save myself headaches in the future?

Update unless you have a reason not to

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?

Sym-links

1. Wayland

Yes, wayland has proper fractional scaling, speed advantages (probably not very noticeable in light apps), and overall better security than X. Xorg is gonna stop being maintained by RedHat around 2028 and wayland is picking up steam. KDE recently made their next big release (Plasma 6) wayland only. New apps that will be ported to linux will probably only want to support wayland, so it's good that you familiarize yourself with it. But if you have a old card then it might cause issues. 2000 series and later should be fine even with the open-source drivers though right now, you should use proprietary.

2. Bloat

Well, there are people who might think that having one extra driver more than you need is a warcrime. But this mostly a meme. Xorg is, however way more concentrated than wayland.

3. Headaches

I didn't experience this personally but I was probably saved by this. Learn basic commands just in case. You can do most things with the GUI but knowing these wont' hurt. Here's an engaging video to help a little. Also learn basics about some ubiquitous Linux glossary (You most probably already know these) like : Desktop Environment, portals etc.

I've been running kinoite on my laptop for a short while now, and I wanted to address a few miscellaneous things.

First: I recommend trying the out of the box experience for a while before going far customizing it. For example, someone mentioned your filesystem layout with subvolumes: that's the default in kinoite: home, var, and root are in subvolumes.

Second: Wayland either is or is about to be the default in fedora (I'm running the beta for the next version, and it's Wayland by default). Try it and see if you have issues before trying to switch to x11.

Flatpak is your first stop for installing software on kinoite, but the fedora repo that's configured by default is missing a lot. If shows software available that you don't see in discover/flatpak, you need to add the flathub repo, which is easy to do, but not obvious (to me) that it wasn't the default.

Finally, Nvidia experience might not be good ootb. You might need to take extra steps to get the proprietary Nvidia driver.

Good luck with your endeavor!

Edit: Firefox

I don't understand why the default install of Firefox isn't the flatpak version. Switch to the flatpak version and you won't have to worry about codecs.

Lol, I just noticed that this thread is 3 weeks old... How is your setup working out?

If you’re going to use nvidia, don’t even touch wayland. Truly an awful experience.

Bloat does matter it is extremely important, not because having a bunch of apps slows anything down or has any tangible impact in that regard. Because it isn’t as sexy as somebody’s hyper specific gentoo install compiled without some specific module.

The reason bloat is such a big deal, particularly if you’re new to it, is because it’s confusing. if you’re trying to fix a problem that you have run into / possibly contributed to, a dozen different programs running in the background that you didn’t put there is going leave you frustrated and disenfranchised.

Pick a modular distribution like Arch, take the loss that is your weekend putting it together and develop an understanding of how the pieces fit together. If you really don’t have time choose something like eg endeavourOS. ( or even Void is quite nice (but non systemd so less conventional))

I would personally recommend avoiding something like fedora or Debian. They are both fantastic distributions that work very well. They are not good at teaching new users how to fix problems and that should be your primary goal here.

Don't listen to the trolls please, you have to think long term, how will you grow in the next 2 to 5 (or even 10) years, because without a doubt you will grow and have a learning curve which alters the way you will use your machine. There are tons and tons of solutions and people pitching it from their Linux ricer power user perspective.

Don't make yourself regret and/or spent countless hours switching back and forth, solving issues, looking through help articles, etc etc

I know it's hard but trust me, you literally cannot make a good choice now with your current state. Just install Ubuntu and get a hang of it, use it, do your stuff you want to do and when you are comfortable with Ubuntu, then throw that piece of junk in the trash and switch to Debian Stable - no, not SID, no you won't miss out on all the cool bleeding edge AUR packages.

When you take this path I described you will grow with the system and you will be able to make the decision based on your needs, wants and use cases. Trust me or suffer, I am sorry new guy.