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Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!

Streamers! If you're considering switching to Linux, be careful choosing Linux Mint!

Mint is based on a 2-year release cycle, so your software will sometimes be 2 years out of date.

It might be stable, but you will miss out on new features. Not great for a fast-moving world like streaming!

There's nothing wrong with Mint, and the stability and slower-paced upgrades are just right for some people, but it's probably not what you want if you're streaming.

I personally recommend Fedora, which has a 6-month release cycle, but there are many other options too. Nobara is a Fedora variant aimed at gaming that makes it easier to set up. I recommend the KDE version!

degenerating degenerate

@hopeless@mas.to · 56 minutes ago

@lina Right... Mint is also based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, this impacts how quickly you will see packaged security updates that originated at Debian.

Fedora is good, but it's an update treadmill. If you don't play games and just want a wife-friendly stable, maintained OS that you only have to security update (can be automated; no reinstalls needed) consider https://rockylinux.org . Ultimately based on fedora, Rocky releases have a 10 year lifetime with security updates.

Janne Moren

@jannem@fosstodon.org · 3 hours ago

@lina
In my experience Ubuntu has become much better at keeping up than they used to. The LTS releases update drivers through hardware enablement kernel updates. And they keep the graphics and sound stacks fairly well updated these days.

I don't know how closely Mint tracks the Ubuntu LTS updates though.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!

@lina@vt.social · 3 hours ago

@jannem Ubuntu LTS has the same problems as Mint. 24.04 LTS still has a PipeWire version that cannot support correct/glitch-free screen/window capture on Nvidia (nor spout2pw). That's not good for the streaming use case.

Rosa Aeterna

@rosaaeterna@transfem.social · 3 hours ago

@lina@vt.social At least in my opinion, the only rough part of Fedora (particularly for people switching over from Windows) is the NVIDIA situation, since I'd imagine a decent chunk of Windows users (streamers especially thanks to them generally wanting extra-strong GPUs) will be coming over with an NVIDIA system and thus they get to deal with getting the akmod from RPMFusion and having to give it a few minutes any time they update for it to actually rebuild (I also, anecdotally, had some issues with the live USB back when I was rocking a 3060 purely because the drivers had a tendency to do weird things after a certain amount of time, like the screen going black. This was around Fedora 40 though, so it could be different now).

However, Fedora is indeed very good! I daily drive it on both my desktop and laptop (rocking KDE for both, which was actually part of my reasoning for choosing Fedora in the first place! Some of the best KDE support I've seen ^-^) and it keeps me very up-to-date on software. I'd imagine Nobara or Ultramarine are even better for super new users, given that they're more of batteries-included Fedora.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!

@lina@vt.social · 3 hours ago

@rosaaeterna Edited to link to Nobara, which is basically Fedora with all that stuff sorted out out of the box ^^

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!

@lina@vt.social · 4 hours ago

*Note: While Mint currently releases every 6 months, their base software only upgrades every 2 years, on an LTS cycle (following Ubuntu LTS or Debian). Only some parts are upgraded on the 6-month cycle, and they are considering doing slower releases in the future.

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4991

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!

@lina@vt.social · 3 hours ago

Just to be clear, this isn't theoretical. The software Linux Mint ships cannot support stable/glitch-free/performant window/screen capture on Nvidia systems. That's the kind of thing that you have to live with running software that is 2 years out of date.

Korgie D. 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

@korgie@tech.lgbt · 4 hours ago

@lina It's at least helpful that people can get a lot of recent software using Flatpak on Mint, while also getting a stable and familiar UI in Cinnamon! It's not the perfect distro for power users, but things are a lot better than they used to be on it.

Personally I do NOT recommend Fedora because of their corporate stance on certain things like how they disable hardware video encoding in drivers even when there is no legal precedent saying that it's legally required for them to do so. And recommending people install the "freeworld" version of Mesa is a bit much.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!

@lina@vt.social · 4 hours ago

@korgie The codec stuff is annoying, but it's a stupid legal thing and it's hard to blame Fedora for it after what happened with Red Hat in the past. The fault is with the codec patent pools, not Fedora.

I personally find the overall Fedora community very welcoming and supportive. Things are kept up to date and bugs fixed quickly, and I think that's well worth the inconvenience of having to drop in RPM Fusion and the freeworld codecs (which is a one-time thing). We have multiple people in Fedora, myself included, focusing on streaming.

Flatpak helps, but it does not fix issues with core system software like PipeWire, so it only helps to a point. I'm making this post in response to the fact that, even with Flatpak, my users can't use Mint without hacky upgrade PPAs because PipeWire is 2 years out of date.

Korgie D. 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

@korgie@tech.lgbt · 4 hours ago

@lina I don't consider it a one-time thing because freeworld can cause conflicts and has absolutely broken systems - in ways that experienced users would easily be able to fix but more casual users will not.

You're absolutely right that patents are the root issue, but very few distros feel this is necessary to do, and it's literally the corporate influence of IBM causing it. It is a downside of using it.

The Pipewire complaint is absolutely valid, though, and hopefully they get that updated.

I would still recommend AMD and Intel users use a distro that doesn't require a third-party repository for video encode. Actually it seems we're both kind of saying similar things - I want to see a supported Mesa version installed and you want to see a supported Pipewire version installed. Perhaps the right distro should have both of those things.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!

@lina@vt.social · 4 hours ago

@korgie Fedora derivatives like Nobara are perfectly fine too. You don't have to use vanilla Fedora. Nobara comes with all the codec stuff sorted out out of the box.

K.O.D.A. 🖥️⚡️

@koda@vt.social · 4 hours ago

@lina This might not be true anymore, but I’ve specifically found Nobara Linux to be the best version of Fedora for streaming and gaming!! Everything is ready to go out of the box (including NVIDIA drivers ^^;;) and it’s been the least amount of issue I’ve had when trying Linux for streaming

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