Linux has gotten really good over the last ~15 years. It used to be that if you didn’t have the most up to date packages, you would be missing game changing features. Now, the distribution you use almost doesn’t matter because even the older packages are good enough for most things.

To answer your question, if it weren’t for gaming, no I wouldn’t mind using Debian as my daily driver. If I ever needed a new package for whatever reason, I would use flatpaks, snaps, docker, or Distrobox to get it.

Personally, yeah it’s the old packages. I want to play games on my desktop and have the newest DE features. An arch based distro seems like it’ll keep up better than Debian.

For my servers though, I only use Debian.

I’m assuming you mean LXC? It’s doable but without some sort of orchestration tools like Nix or Ansible, I imagine on-going maintenance or migrations would be kind of a headache.

You might come across docker run commands in tutorials. Ignore those. Just focus on learning docker compose. With docker compose, the run command just goes into a yaml file so it’s easier to read and understand what’s going on. Don’t forget to add your user to the docker group so you aren’t having to type sudo for every command.

Commands you’ll use often:

docker compose up - runs container

docker compose up -d - runs container in headless mode

docker compose down - shuts down container

docker compose pull - pulls new images

docker image list - lists all images

docker ps - lists running containers

docker image prune -a - deletes images not being used by containers to free up space

he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.

Of the two options you gave, I’d go with Mint. If your friend runs into a problem, it would probably be easier to diagnose the issue since it’s just Ubuntu/Debian under the hood.

Once they get used to it, they can try other gaming specific distros if they want to try to get a little more performance.

Should I just learn how to use Docker?

Yes. I put off learning it for so long and now can’t imagine self-hosting anything without it. I think all you have to do is set a static IP to the NIC from your router and then specify the IP and port in a docker-compose.yml file:

Ex: IP-address:external-port:container-port

services:
    app-name:
        ports
            - 192.168.1.42:3000:3000

I’d love to but it’s a chicken and egg thing. Regular people don’t understand bitcoin let alone monero. On top of that, you still have fees for converting from a currency to monero and again from monero to a currency, so there’s still a middle man :/

I understand your view and sympathize deeply but there is a lot wrong in the world today and if I have to divert energy somewhere to try and change something, Patreon’s 10/90 split is at the bottom of the list for me at the moment. Regular working class people aren’t getting that good of a deal at the jobs they work at. I’m not even talking 90/10, just getting their .01% of the profits in a 1000 person org for their contribution would probably be life changing.

You are right but our frames of reference are different.

I wouldn’t say these services are nothing. Are they worth 10%? Eh.

A 90/10 split for content creators who otherwise wouldn’t know how to build and operate their own platform doesn’t sound like a terrible deal. It’s not amazing but if there were better options, Patreon may not be so popular.

Edit: I want to clarify. Patreon is a for profit company who has apparently tried raising prices already and back tracked. Eventually, Patreon will try and squeeze out more profit from the creators and the user base will be big enough that Patreon will have the leverage to do so; we’ve all seen it before. I’m not saying Patreon is a good company, I’m not saying they won’t be dicks in the future, I’m not saying the system as it is, is good. I’m only saying 10% isn’t a bad deal when so many other options are worse (ex. Apple taking 30%)

Fair enough

What’s wrong with Patreon? They advertise a 10% fee. It may be a little more complicated than that but 10% seems pretty reasonable considering the services they offer.

Just to add to your comment; get a three phase inspection. Inspect the foundation before the walls go up, inspect right before the drywall goes up, and inspect after the drywall goes up before you start signing paperwork. If you wait to inspect after the drywall is up, you can miss a lot.

I did it a few years ago, although I had an AMD GPU.

It works surprisingly well but games that require anti-cheat software (ex. Valorant) won’t work.

The only other good solution that wasn’t mentioned in your post is to just buy and maintain a dedicated windows box. Short of that, GPU passthrough is a great option