I play a lot of games over steam, and I am coming from windows.
CachyOS or Bazzite if you play games
SteamOS if you ONLY play games…and replace your windows for general stuff with Linux Mint
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.
That was kind of my point saying HDR support is hard on Mint. However, I game plenty on Mint and never had any problems aside from that.
Had 0 issues on mint with gaming. I play plenty of modern AAA, AA games.
Pick something with a good window manager, typing into a terminal without fingers and thumbs is going to be tricky.
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
I’m just glad that someone FINALLY asked this question!
I don’t think you can install Linux on a cat. Please do not the 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.
From what I hear, gaming = bazzite.
Also you can check compatibility of your games with ProtonDB.
My wife and I play a lot of games; my wife is also not super technical — she can get her way around some problems, but not deeper ones, and never uses the terminal, — and we’ve enjoyed bazzite quite a bit with almost no issues.
I also do development, and that’s been fine as well.
Try this: https://distrochooser.de/en
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.
Look at zorinOS or Mint. Those are good starting points
Thank you
Always remember, distrohopping is allowed. Your first distribution doesn’t have to stray with you forever. It can, but doesn’t have to. If you hear about a cool new distro, feel free to try it out.
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
Worth mentioning that if you’re on AMD, you’re pretty much open for choice. If you have nVidia, make sure the OS you go with calls out nVidia support as a feature. Even then, your specific config may require that you try out a couple before finding the right fit.
I personally tried Bazzite and had a rough experience with performance and haven’t had issues on EndeavorOS, but have read reports from other nVidia users that had the opposite experience. All to say, your mileage may vary, and don’t give up right away if the first one doesn’t feel right.
Sample size of one here - I am on EndeavourOS and have an Nvidia card. I had issues with KDE and with Cinnamon (weird UI hiccups). Switched over to Hyprland and haven’t had those issues since (I did have a TON of issues when Hyprland updated from .52 to .53) and also don’t recommend Hyprland setup for a new user, but just wanted to share my experience here.
I also tried Niri but had issues getting steam games to launch - I plan to revisit it in a year or so to see if anything changes. I found videos/reviews where some folks were saying they could game with no problem so it might be a skill issue on my part.
The install experience with EOS was totally painless and I’ll likely continue to use it on future PC builds (if ram prices ever come down). Looking forward to switching everything to AMD one day.
I installed Fedora on my wife’s PC and she hasn’t had any issues at all (her build is totally AMD). I hate to say it but the answer is likely “it depends” based on how you will use your machine and what hardware you’ve got). Might be easiest to go with Zorin or Mint as mentioned in one of the top comments.
If you have nVidia, make sure the OS you go with calls out nVidia support as a feature.
That makes the setup easier, but the capacity of making it work or not doesn’t actually change.
I’d say not only pick an OS that explicitly supports it, but make sure to test first as a live-image without installing and overwriting the OS that is already there working.
I wish there was an easy way to test this, but I got two weeks into my setup before I noticed performance issues because it was only affecting some of my games. This is still a good idea, just not a guarantee.
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?
