Hello, everyone. First of all, I think my question is a variant of "Which distro is best?", so I think it goes on this subforum based on the rules, but if it belongs on the newbie subforum, I apologize and please move it there.
Moving on, I'm currently making the slow transition into Linux in preparation for Windows 7 end-of-life. Nothing urgent or in a hurry. Since a lot (maybe all) of the stuff I have on Steam and Blizzard do not have Linux ports, I'm hoping I could use Wine in the future. Does distro choice matter to Wine? Is there such thing as "Distro A is more compatible with Wine" or "Wine is not officially supported on Distro B"? I've tried to use Wine once with the smallest standalone exe I have on disk (InSpectre from grc.com), but all I got was some segmentation fault or something. I forget which distro it was, and it probably failed because I haven't configured Wine correctly yet, but I just want to make sure I'm starting on the right foot while I'm not settled on a distro yet.
Speaking of distros, I'd also like to hear some input from experienced users on making the choice. I tried an online distro picker I found somewhere here, and it suggested CentOS, RHEL, or Scientific (because they keep bundled apps at a minimum), but I also read here that using server distros for personal use is not advised, so I'm confused. The default plan is to still have Windows on another partition to keep a compatible platform for my stuff regardless of Wine, which means I'd have to pick a distro that installs on gpt (to a non-technical average Joe like me, the EFI boot menu is much easier than daisy chaining bootloaders). Which distro/s hits closest to the following ballpark:
- installs on gpt
- minimum number of bundled apps
- allows proprietary drivers (nvidia, realtek, canon or hp printers)
- compatible with Wine
- likely to be around in the foreseeable future
- ships with Cinnamon, MATE, or Lxqt (so I don't have to switch DE's after installation). I want to avoid KDE because my hardware is dated and can't load it fast
Thank you for reading. At this point, I'll list my experiences getting my feet wet with various distros for whatever it's worth. I started some time early this year, and my methods are by no means efficient or systematic.
1. Ubuntu - too "smartphone".
2. Debian (+Cinnamon) - uses Firefox ESR (I prefer the non ESR version). Audio did not work for twitch.tv, but it worked on another site (forgot what site but it wasn't youtube). Tried installing other DE's from the repository, but some utilities had redundant software installed.
3. Devuan - this was before the current ASCII release. I think I had to add -nomodeset to boot properly into desktop. Repository seemed more dated than Debian. I probably won't end up with Xfce, it's definitely not for me out-of-the-box, but it was customizable to an extent that I haven't fully explored.
4. PCLinux - Audio worked for twitch.tv. I think the default login created from installation can't use sudo (not in list or something). "Doesn't shut down properly"; there's a system message on the screen that says everything is closed, but it doesn't cut power until I hold the button on my tower.
5. Mint - It has a utility/gui for the firewall which I don't remember seeing on previous distros. I had to "manually" add google to Firefox's search options, which gives an impression that it's not using a "vanilla" Firefox. It didn't do a gpt install, no Mint entry on the EFI boot menu, and the EFI system partition was empty, but that's probably something I botched during installation.
6. Manjaro (+Budgie) - No right-click for context menu on the desktop. It seems like it uses a separate gui for updating the kernel, which is probably a good thing in case updating breaks compatibility with something else. The installer scares me because it might wipe data on the EFI system partition before writing its stuff.
