Linux mint hands down
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Do you got NVIDIA?
I swapped from windows to Opensuse Tumbleweed recently. Seems like a really nice distro. Frequent updates and easy rollbacks if something breaks. Luckily I haven't had to use that feature yet but it's nice knowing I have it. Yast is also great for changing system settings with a gui instead of using konsole for all that.
Counter Strike 2 and WoW have been running great.
Additional to the Mint suggestions: Mint tones down the "Ubuntu-ness" of their default distribution, but it's still Ubuntu under the hood. LMDE is the version of Mint based on straight Debian skipping the Ubuntu "middle-man" if that sounds more appealing.
Can't speak to compatibility one way or another, though.
My computer is old and made of parts from well-known manufacturers. Everything in it is pretty well-known to the open-source community at this point, so that might well be giving me a huge advantage with regard to drivers and such. (Case in point, I have an NVIDIA graphics card and Intel i7 from the tail end of the era where people wouldn't advise you against getting either, and in fact might have outright recommended them over AMD. Yes, that old. Legacy proprietary drivers work fine for me.)
does LMDE have KDE flavours yet? Ive always thought cinnamon was pretty ugly
Official support of KDE was dropped by the Mint team a while back, and I'm pretty sure LMDE has only ever been Cinnamon too.
Despite this, it is possible to install and use a different desktop manager.
KDE and all the usual KDE packages remain available from the Software Manager, and a different DM can be selected at the GUI login screen (once installed, of course).
If you don't even want to touch Cinnamon once, I suspect you could jump to a text-only terminal, enter apt install kde-standard
etc. and then jump back to the GUI login to see if it knows about KDE. A reboot (or similar) might be needed? That should be all though. (Very reminiscent of deliberately using command line ftp
or a Windows port of wget
to get Firefox back in the day when people didn't want to touch Internet Explorer, but Cinnamon isn't that bad, surely? ;) )
(FWIW I don't mind it. I switched from Win7 back in the day and Cinnamon was similar enough that I felt at home. One day maybe I'll switch to something else. KDE probably won't be it, but you never know.)
thanks for the info, I won't hold my breath haha. I'll probably just stick with Kubuntu for now, it's not so bad after removing snapd
EndeavuorOS. It's a seamless base configuration of Arch which has a wonderful wiki that has a ton of stuff to tell you.
You can install pamac for a GUI for the package manager. Do yay
to search for any package and install it; do yay
(nothing else) to upgrade everything, and yay -Rcns
to remove stuff and all their unused dependencies. I also recommend chaoticAUR
For the DE I recommend MATE but you can select any of the major ones in the installer. For me Steam didn't work when xdg-portal-gnome was installed though and firefox-like apps booted real slow, so you may or may not want to try GNOME.
Get synapse for a spotlight-like search; it uses the alt+space keybind by default
Fedora is great with gnome for beginer and don't get in way to much like Ubuntu when used daily
I still think Ubuntu or a flavor of it is the right answer for people new to Linux.