I play a lot of games over steam, and I am coming from windows.
Bazzite, Linux Mint, CachyOS
Try each of them out, see what you mesh best with, join their respective discord/matrix for further help and details 👍
Mint is beginner friendly. The Cinnamon desktop is very Windows-like. But if you want HDR support I don’t recommend Mint because its desktops are mostly on X11. It updates the kernel less frequently, so it’s more stable, less cutting edge.
Pop!_OS is also beginner friendly, gaming oriented, makes installing NVIDIA drivers easy, and since its desktops are on Wayland, you can get HDR support. Its kernel updates more frequently, so newer hardware gets support sooner.
Mint is not a great idea. Its pretty nice for starters, but not for gamers. I had a lot of problems with fps and the mint compositor.
Had 0 issues on mint with gaming. I play plenty of modern AAA, AA games.
gentoo!!no but actually, linux mint is very good for newcomers, especially as its desktop has resemblance to windows. Pop!_os is also really good and better for gaming maybe? I would avoid ubuntu (slower and a lot more bloated) and especially manjaro (breaks a LOT without you even doing anything).
I might also cautiously suggest arch? It’s kind of a meme in the community because of its own community being seen as a bit toxic, but once you’ve got past the install and customization process (which does admittedly take a lot of time and reading), you have a system that is entirely your own in almost every way. For example, in the case of desktop environments, you can use cinammon from mint or gnome from pop!_os or even a more lightweight one like xfce. You also tend to have a more stable system, as you won’t have unknowingly have some unstable packages hidden in the bowels of your system that get relied on by 73 other packages and could break at any moment.
One thing to note is that Linux can read your Windows partitions. If you have data on drives you’ll still need, you can leave them and Linux can access them fine. (Windows can’t read most file systems though, so the other direction of this mostly doesn’t work. Windows can’t read most Linux partitions).
If you’re reasonably technologically competent, I’d recommend CachyOS or Garuda. These are Arch based, so the Arch wiki and Arch User Repository are available, and great resources. They come with everything you need for gaming though, unlike base Arch. You don’t need to fiddle with things or set things up. They just work out-of-the-box.
If you’re not really technologically competent, but want to learn, the Mint recommendations are fine. It’s one of the most used distros, so there’s still plenty of help available. Alternatively, and I think better, there’s Fedora. For either of these, choose KDE versions, not Gnome or anything else. KDE is more customizable and closer to Windows too. (Though it can be customized to be more like anything else, or whatever you want too.)
If you really don’t want to learn, Bazzite or maybe Zorin are there.
Pick something with a good window manager, typing into a terminal without fingers and thumbs is going to be tricky.
Try this: https://distrochooser.de/en
I’m just glad that someone FINALLY asked this question!
I usually recommend Linux Mint. Its based on Ubuntu, so when searching for help online everything that works for Ubuntu should work for mint. Another Advantage mint has is, that it has quite a lot of UIs for a lot of applications/settings. This means, that you dont have to work with the terminal that much when doing something. However, I Am highly recommending that in the long term you should try to find your way around in the terminal. A lit if help that you will find online is based around the terminal, and knowing what commands do is quite valuable.
I just got Mint working on one of my machines yesterday, the process was remarkably painless
This question is useless, especially here where you’re going to get a million different answers from some of the most opinionated experts on the Internet.
They are all effectively the same with very minor (and shrinking) differences. The actual biggest difference is the type of release cycle (atomic, rolling, etc) and you can find multiple of those in the same distro. Again… It’s all effectively the same.
I’m gonna recommend what works for me, but it might not work for you. I like these because (again, in my specific use case) they “just worked” with little to no problems: Fedora for a desktop/laptop and bazzite for a handheld. Again… YMMV.
Go check distrowatch and try a few different distros until you find one you like. The more popular, the more likely you can find a community to support your questions.
They’re all pretty much the same except for a couple, like nix, Gentoo, slackware, etc. maybe stay away from those. fuck around and find out is the best way.
actually genuinely this. The recommendations here are if you just want to install linux once and not think about it again but distro-hopping is really the best thing to do if you’re ok with re-installing everything once in a while.
I don’t think you can install Linux on a cat. Please do not the cat
Doesn’t matter. You can install it on any other hardware because Linux includes ‘cat’ already. You will not need the old one anymore.
PLEASE DO NOT THE CAT
I’m going to go out on a limb here… If you have no Linux experience, download virtualbox and a handful of distros to try out in your current machine.
CachyOS is great for gaming, I’d suggest the KDE desktop PopOS is also a great choice, their native cosmic desktop is nice. Mint with cinnamon is also a good choice for gaming and daily use Bazzite is also a popular gaming distro that also uses KDE Xubuntu is also a great choice, Ubuntu base with XFCE desktop, great for gaming and a big supportive community
Try these and maybe a handful others to play with until you find a desktop that you find intuitive and easy to find what you need. Once you play with a few of these pick one and try to stick with it as you learn Linux in a full native install.
Another really simple way to do essentially the same is to set the bios in your machine to support boot from a USB stick (and in some machines, that involves disabling the ‘secure boot’ setting that prevents any OS but the OEM OS from loading on the machine). Once you’ve got that, you can run any distro if you’ve got it on a USB stick by booting your machine from it.
Another great idea, just keep in mind how much of a performance hit running an os off of a USB is
Kubuntu is the best. It’s Ubuntu with KDE tools and programs. You have Plasma as a desktop environment, which is very close to Window but that you can customize to your need.
Ubuntu is very popular so you get pretty much everything available and with tutorial, ressources and everything. KDE really push it to the most user friendly, GUI for everything kind of state.
Steam is easy to install, take charge of Proton or anything needed for your games to run.
I was very frustrated by Gnome (the default desktop environment for Ubuntu), failing miserably to make it more like Window. I guess Gnome is more for Mac users.
The only thing I recommend is deactivating Snap and installing Flatpack. It’s easy to find tuto on how to do that. Both Snap and Flatpack are doing the same idea, to bundle a program and it’s dependencies in a format that allows easier distribution to many distro. But Snap is not as good as Flatpack. You are free to leave it or to use both.
Either way, you can also install program made for Ubuntu or Debian. And with KDE come Discover that is like an App Store and updater.
Linux Mint is also good but I really think Plasma is the best desktop environment. Good thing to know you can always install more desktop environment then the one already installed, so don’t hesitate to try other.
If you are already engaged in a very pro open source stance, you might look at Fedora.
Anyway you choose, there are community of people passionate with Linux that can help you every step of the way. LLM can also help you get the basic. Good luck and welcome 🤗
Honestly I’ve found Kubuntu breaks in weird places for weird reasons. It’s always been that way. Neon was supposed to address this but it just broke in other places instead.
If KDE is your priority, I see only 2 top tier options. Fedora if you want it to just work out of the box, arch if you are okay arguing a little to make your point and have it work how you want.
No “breaking” in my experience. I had a weird thing with sound in the beginning that I tried to fix and failed but fixed itself after an update (at this point I believe it is a rite of passage for Linux 😂) and a weird bug with Nvidia on resume from sleep that was a bitch to figure out but really easy to fix. Since then no issues at all. 25.10 is smooth sailing, the update was easy and problem free. I hope I’m not cursing myself.
Now that I feel a little bit more experience with Linux in contemplating moving to Fedora KDE.
I fear one thing, it’s that my GPU’s driver is technically not maintained by Nvidia (GTX 1070). I heard Arch user suffered from that and it will eventually come for Ubuntu. Don’t know what to do for now, but I’m sure there will be solution.
Ugh NVIDIA, just rip off that bandaid and get over it. And fedora is not terrible not has a sort of corporate feel I can’t explain and dislike, and selinux is the fucking devil, but it’s probably wise to learn it even if you end up not using it. DNF an absolute delight though, and the out of box ease reminds me of Ubuntu back in its heyday.
I would highly recommend against installing arch AS your first distro. You could go with EndeavourOS (or some other Arch based Distros), but plain arch will be very unforgiving if you dont know what you are doing.
Totally agree. Arch is great but it’s not the right place for a beginner.
I’d love to help you, but unfortunately I can’t think of a single distro that would run on a cat.
Well, I do know that for terminal emulators, KiTTY works pretty well :-)
They only run Miaowcrosoft products.
Not even CATchyOS?
Ubuntu is the starter distro. Start there. Figure out how this shit works and learn what you love and what you hate about it. Then you’ll be in a better position to find what you actually want.
Do not start with arch. That is not what it is for.
You don’t want kali. It solves a specific problem you do not have.
Avoid all immutable distros at first. They are great but add a layer of complexity that will fuck you if you don’t have the basics down first.
