he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.
If you’re able to be there for the install, then great. I’ve had a couple of times where, due to certain hardware, it needs a different sound server or some other workaround. In an extreme case, you might need to fallback to a second choice of distro.
but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience
Is there anything specific you’ve heard that applies to your friend’s needs? (Honest question, I haven’t looked deep into it.)
If it’s just small things like ‘Steam and [etc] is installed already’, then you can just do that easily anyway.
no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks [snip]
Keep in mind that Mint uses apt and (optionally, but IMO inevitably for a gamer/dev) Flatpaks integrated in their package manager, which has gotten much smoother but still is two different systems which can cause confusion. I don’t know how Bazzite handles this.
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