I always recommend what I use, but what I use is because its an out of the box distro. So its about installing and immediately being productive. Its called zorin and its an ununtu lts respin that comes with wine and playonlinux, disc burning software, libre office, basically as much or more than a typical windows machine would have but by and large libre software (it will ask at installation to use proprietary stuff like nvidia drivers). Even an rdp client. It also does a windows like gnome desktop setup but I have found I prefer to instal kde. I have installed a few things since having it but they are for some specific thing. The main point is its easy and gets you going fast. If this sounds like what you would like then try zorin. Its main weakness I would say is its lts and the farthest thing from bleeding edge you can get, also for strictly gaming there are better distros I think.

Whatever you land on, I hope you enjoy it.

Gaming laptops are the best.

Pop_OS is great, but avoid the new COSMIC beta release, which is very buggy. If you opt for it, go with the GNOME-based 22 release.

Linux Mint is also one of the most friendly and approachable linux distros. It’s default desktop, Cinnamon, is very much inspired by older Windows versions. I loathe Cinnamon, but masses of people love it. I will admit that it is one of the easiest places to get started with Linux.

If you want something more sophisticated than Mint, look at distros that include KDE Plasma desktop. It feels very familiar for Windows users, but still offers a lot of customization. Fedora KDE, OpenSUSE, and CachyOS are excellent choices. Fedora is my pick but OpenSUSE is a great alternative if you want something without corporate ties, and Cachy is more optimized for gaming, but slightly more complicated to use since it’s based on Arch.

If your machine is going to be used almost exclusively for gaming, there is no reason to look at anything other than Bazzite. It’s simple, “just works”, is preconfigured for gaming, familiar, and very difficult to break.

And as always, stay far away from anything Ubuntu/Canonical.

If you want to try Pop OS, go ahead. The most important thing is back up data you want to keep - it’s not a bad idea to have a dedicated partition for your home folder and another for the OS to help with fixing problems or moving to another distro, but backups off your laptop are critically important. Then if you don’t like a particular distro, or you fuck up, you can install another and restore your data from backup.

Personally I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, I’ve tried quite a few distros and I think generally for gaming they’re much the same. OpenSuSE has a good user interface in YaST for tweaking and keeping the system how I want it. I like being on a distro with a big install base and linked into an enterprise distro as there is an incentive to test rigorously and also fix things when they break. But Tumbleweed is a rolling release so there will still occasionally be problems.

If you want stability and no headaches then I’d go for a decent point release distro with a big install base overall. I’d suggest OpenSuSE Leap or Fedora KDE over smaller niche/community distros. Go for Gnome equivalents if that’s your thing. I have gone off Mint in recent months as I think too much support out on the Web is out of date and provides bad solutions to problems (such as adding random ubuntu repos to install software). Mint itself.Is a decent distro.

I’d avoid Ubuntu due to Snap, I’d avoid Debian due to its slow upgrade cycle (very stable distro but may not be the best for high end gaming and tweaking), and I’d avoid Arch due to the complexity of set up (unless you want your system exactly right and are prepared to problem solve your way to what you want; it can be a very powerful and efficient set up of you’re willing to out he work in). I’d also personally avoid atomic distros as it can be a headache to tweak and run custom software although there are ways if you enjoy leaning new things.

Bazzite rocks, especially for gaming. I started with Ubuntu, did arch for a while (which was a great learning experience), and have been on bazzite for years now.

Pop and mint seem like great choices too if plug-and-play gaming isn’t your main focus.

Which distro should I use?

Them’s fightin words round here. Fuck [Distro 1] and its fanboys. [Distro 2] is clearly superior.

For real though:

Things for you to decide:

Which desktop environment do you want (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, cosmic, etc)

Do you want it to be super up to date all the time (quick updates, but may break something)? Or are you OK with slower updates for a more stable system?

Difficulty: How hard do you want things to be? Do you want things to be set up out-of-the-box and lots of solutions online? Or are you willing to dive deep, do stuff yourself and figure stuff out from wikis?

I wanted KDE (objectively the best desktop environment obviously) and started with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and loved it. Highly recommended. I didn’t know about TuxedoOS at the time and that seems like a good place to start too. Now I know more and am on CachyOS and am super happy with it.

If u are newbie then linux mint I am using cachyos (arch linux based distro with performance optimizations)

What distro should I use?

This always feels like a loaded question. I don’t believe there is a one choice that is “right.”

After distro hopping and trying many, I have come to a few realizations for myself.

There are a few factors to consider:

• What Desktop Environment (if any…): KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Cosmic, etc (this gets a bit more complicated depending on if you don’t want a desktop environment. You could just go CLI or with just a Window Manager like Hyprland, Sway, i3, or others I’m unfamiliar with.)
• What package manager are you comfortable with? And what style of package management do you want? Do you want older but tested and more stable? Do you want bleeding edge?
• Is systemd a deal breaker for you?

Really what I am getting at, you don’t know what you don’t know. So test out many! You can do this in a Virtual Machine with Virtualbox on Windows before switching.

EndeavourOS is really good. Arch-based but easy to maintain. You’ll never have to do a major release upgrade. The only issue is to keep it updated, make sure to do little updates weekly. They have a great community and it’s a wonderful OS.

So pop os is fun but they need to iron out kinks (mainly the pop shop and the cosmic de)

Go Mint.

So pop os is fun but they need to iron out kinks (mainly the pop shop and the cosmic de)

Go Mint.

ZorinOS, better than standard Ubuntu and more modern looking than Mint.

If u want to go Arch > Garuda or Cachy. Endeavour if u are one of the “its bloat” whishy washy purists.

I’m using Pop! OS 22.04, I’m happy with it. It’s a good distro for gaming, BUT… lately there have been a lot of issues with the NVIDIA driver, and the Linux 6.16 kernel. I only recommend it if you’re comfortable troubleshooting, using the TTY, and doing other stuff before giving up and deleting your whole drive. 😅

My recommendation is Nobara Linux or bazzite Linux. Both are fedora based. But bazzite would make use of that rtx.

Try Pop. They just put Cosmic into Beta and updated the OS so now would be a great time to give it a shot. Or just load up a bunch of distro live isos on like a thumb drive or external drive and try them all and see which one you like the best. There’s zero harm in distro hopping and you should never feel like you need to lock yourself down to one distro for months or years on end. I myself distro hop all the time when I want to switch up my linux experience. good way to learn them all too. I’ll bounce around from Arch to Fedora back to Arch then to NixOS over to Void or whatever I want. I run NixOS on my main machine, have CachyOS/Arch on another and my server is Ubuntu. And all that will change soon as I want to go and try out one of the new KDE distros or something completely different.