Want switch to linux

Based on your last paragraph, you might fall in the supernoob catergory. You'll want an immutable distribution, you can't break those Unless you tell it to let you break it.

As a windows user, you'll find familiarity in Fedora Kionite.

If you prefer a touchscreen oriented experience consider Fedora Silverblue.

There's a few other options on the page I'm linking, I haven't tried and therefore can't recommend either of the others.

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/

Edit: my formatting was 🗑️

Edit 2, electric boogaloo:

OP in your post you state you want Wallpaper Engine to work, unfortunately, you'll have issues there. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish with wallpaper engine you may be able to do the same using KDE Plasma. I personally use a VLC command line call to enable animated wallpapers on my rig, there's not exactly a standard for it on Linux so many of the solutions you find will be clunky. Just remember if you go around messing with your xorg.conf file you need to have a backup of it so you can undo changes easily in a terminal.

You're welcome to DM me if you need assistance.

Relevant post I made:

A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

If your computer can't handle Linux Mint, then either you do something wrong, or your computer is really unstable. I won't ask you to use Mint, but I will say, that I use it on three different computers, and not a single problem anywhere. Dual-boot is notoriously unstable - mostly due to MS... So my advice is, to use a computer for Linux by it self...

I suggest you to check out Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. I have been using it for years without any problems. I also have dual boot with Windows, but I think I will delete Windows soon and use only Linux.

EndeavourOS is the best imo because it's basically arch with a minimal skin on it to aide in installation etc

I've been using it for the better part of 5 years now with no issues. I play games, self host, work etc It's great.

If you install paru you get access to the AUR which has everything under the sun ready to install.

Linux Mint Debian Edition.

You say not to suggest mint, but you most probably used an Ubuntu based Mint so that doesn't count.

I’m always shocked by all the recommendations to use Mint. It feels dated and ugly. Admittedly, I migrated from Mac, but how abused must you Windows users be to find Mint a suitable replacement? I personally wound up with Zorin OS and recommend it. The software store makes installing apps from multiple sources tolerable. It’s also got a nice UI and you can easily change it.

Linux Mint

Honestly, Linux Mint is probably the best option. Failing that, Fedora is another good option which is derived from Red Hat, it does things differently to Debian based systems like Mint and Ubuntu, but it's widely supported.

You'll need to iterate what you were doing when it stopped working, 99% of the time, it's down to human error. As someone once said:

"Unix [or Linux] will give you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. If you didn't think rope would do that, you should have read the man page."

Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.

What sort of "simple" things did you have trouble with in Mint?

You could try popOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu. But without knowing what you struggled with, Mint should still be the best choice of you're new. Your troubles could just be the desktop environment you picked, or enabling third party/proprietary repositories. Or they could be a legit issue that is easily fixed using a different distro.

https://fedoraproject.org/kde/

I dunno, I started with Debian and then many months later learned that it was one of the harder distributions given the outdated packages.

Glad I chose Debian because Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, PureOS, etc are all derivatives of it.

Mint is a good transition from windows

My advice: Stick to distros and softwares that are widely used. When presented with options, tend to stick to the defaults.

Just because literally 100% is customizable in the Linux world does not mean you have to customize your system 100%.

That's my motto since 1996 when I started using Linux.

@Mojtaba you can try Manjaro, is a nice distro

Keep to popular distros. I'd personally recommend Pop os or fedora. Opensuse is up there too just never clicked with me when I was a new users.

I actually have started to discourage people using Ubuntu because of forced snap packages and multiple software store GUIs. It has led to a lot more confusion for new users even though Ubuntu is supposed to be user friendly.

I'm not sure that you can get wallpaper engine running. Maybe someone else can say otherwise, but I wouldn't trust second hand.

Ubuntu,Pop!_OS,Fedora,elementary OS. I would like to start with Ubuntu or Pop!_OS. These are the most popular and well-adapted distros, which are ideal for gaming, creativity and safe use. If Ubuntu is not to your liking because of Snap or telemetry, Pop!_OS can be a great alternative. But you can still download any distribution you want, you just need to look for it yourself

Something listed in the top 10 or so on https://distrowatch.com/. Personally I like one of the Debian based distros.

Currently we use Ubuntu and Debian. Ubuntu would be the better of the two for beginners.

The distrowatch beginners list is: https://distrowatch.com/search-mobile.php?category=Beginners#simple

Fedora or UwUntu.

99% of the time a dual boot doesn't work its because of Windows. There should be no real reason that Mint fails anything simple as long as its compatible with your system. I've seen others report that Windows will occasionally destroy a dual boot when updating.

If you're new then fedora is great

Honestly I suggest learning in avm first so you can do save states. I recommend doing stunting like nix or a declarative/ composable distro. Learn the new way so that your getting the tools and things that are actually being used.

Don't get me wrong it's not an easy learning curve but I think it's the better method of learning.

So... do it?

Now to the question which distro, honestly it does not matter YET!

You probably don't even know what a distro is (no offense) but what you did highlight clearly are the needs, namely :

• playing games
• popular
• not Mint because somehow it breaks (would be VERY important to understand why though)

... so that actually narrows things down quite a bit.

The most popular distribution are the easiet to find (I'm on Debian and SteamOS so I use Arch BTW) and that's a safe choice indeed. Playing games does not narrow things down much as most distro, if not all, do not prevent against playing game and IMHO the optimization specific to gaming are pretty much pointless in most cases.

Your edit point that you are trying a distribution already so yes, please, do go for it. I do suggest though that WHEN things go wrong, like it did with Mint, you take the time to understand WHY. This in itself will help you to either switch to another distribution and arguably more importantly what even is a distribution and finally which one of the remaining ones (if you do actually switch rather than fix) are more appropriate for you.

Finally my last recommendation is to back up your data. That's what IMHO make the difference between having fun distro hopping versus pulling hair out stressing that your last game save, or work notebooks, will not be deleted.

Have fun learning!

I have to give it that the Fedora distros are a slightly bit superior to Ubuntu variants but for those that value some degree of not favoring corporate US (IBM/Red Hat) that provides AI resources for Israel's military to do what it is doing... Myself I tried to like Mint, I really did... but could not... not just it is old-fashioned looking but has limitations with scaling and others.

Now, I do recognize for the initiators is it great! Now, for those that find Mint ugly I recommend TuxedoOS... I find it as good as Kubuntu but without its known limitations with flatpaks. Yes, TuxedoOS was created for Tuxedo laptops but they left it open to use it with others so no problems at all and very well maintained. Now, you may want remove the Tuxedo app that they installed just to free some resources... a 10-seconds thing to do. Drawback is servers in Germany so a bit slower updates than usual for most.

Bazzite is great because is rpm-ostree based. But you need to understand a little bit the concept of atomic distro. For gaming, I think it comes packed with most of the required things so imo, try Bazzite. Also, linux mint it's very easy to use, fi you do something simple and you need to reinstall the distro, maybe something was done wrong from the beginning.

The age old question. You have to understand that Linux the kernel is made in such a way that anything built on top of it will always require way too much from the user. It feels like something made from programmers for programmers, just like how UNIX was designed. No distro will be able to change that. Windows is packed with bandaids to make it behave closer to what users expect, but anything that comes from UNIX has it's focus in making the code nice, not making ordinary users happy necessarily.

So picking a distro is entirely a choice on how you wanna interact with the kernel's interfaces, but they're still the same interfaces. No pretty UI will change that.

Just make sure that the distro you choose has a mature community behind it and that packages are being actively maintained. Make sure that if you file a bug report it will get some attention. That's the only thing you should care about in a distro, everything else is flashy nonsense.

Edit: Also as you can see by the replies to my comment, Linux is kind of a cult, so beware of that.

Linux Distro made to accommodate Windows Users by being as similar as is reasonable in UI and organization: AnduinOS.

If you try it, use 1.3, as you are not an enterprise use case.

If you're a complete newbie, go Ubuntu. Yes, it's boring but the community is huge. You can find a lot of answers about problems on reddit/ stack over flow...etc. Literally any Linux problem you have, a Google search of that will show many answers from Ubuntu community.

PopOS did it for me

Try Void Linux. It's awesome.

MX Linux

It’s 2025, if you’ve got the space to dual boot, you’ve got space for snapshots. There’s no reason not to set them up. Btrfs, ZFS, LVM, pick your poison. Disk is cheap, your time isn't.

And if “simple stuff” is breaking your system, that tells me three things:

1. You’re still using apt-get instead of apt

2. You’re ignoring dependency warnings

3. You’re probably not fully understanding the commands you’re running — so RTFM

So yeah, I will be telling you to use Mint, with at LEAST daily snapshots.

I used Ubuntu for a long time. It is convenient because it is very popular and there is a lot of software available for installation without any extra steps. However, I think it has become quite overloaded. I have been using Fedora with KDE for a relatively long time and I am very satisfied. I use it as my main home and work operating system. It has proven to be very stable. I am engaged in software development, so I use it very actively, and I am happy with it. it meets all my needs. I think You could consider Fedora.

I've learned so much Linux on Nobara and i feel like it's not mentioned much, not it's got an active discord and gets regular updates

ZorinOS maybe ?

Bazzite is great for gaming !

Nobara too.

Try Manjaro. It will be the easiest to set up and find software that hasn't been deliberately packaged for your setup.

I’m a big fan of Elementary OS, it’s likely the most user friendly desktop, easy to use and plenty of advanced features, such as thoughtful options to make the interface usable by everyone.

https://getaurora.dev/en

theres a new one made by a microsoft enginer as a hobby project called Anduin OS it is very simmilar to windows based on ubuntu it can be downloaded at https://www.anduinos.com/ and a video by mental outlaw can be found at https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=bQAUFgS657w i personally never tried it and it is a hobby project but it looks promising

Should be popular distro so if i have a problem i can ask about it

I mean, Arch has the Arch Wiki which is very good. (I use Arch, btw.) 😸

I'm surprised Mint is giving you trouble. Where you doing something... risky? Or maybe the hardware you're running isn't very compatible?

Otherwise, a distro like VanillaOS (or any immutable distro) might be able to keep your system more stable.

Just note that is you really need a safe place, having Windows installed on the same machine is counter productive. Make sure you encrypt your Linux partitions. Otherwise it's very easy to mount them and sniff all the things from Windows.

If you get to the point where you decide you want a distro that is not immutable, try Garuda, it's where I went after Bazzite. It is also gaming focused and has a great helper app to install most of the things most people need and do updates.

I used Mint on my previous system but currently rolling CachyOS personally. Bazzite was a close contender for me.

Fedora

I just installed Nobara in a similar setup for similar reasons a few days ago after having several bad experiences with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint. I wanted to move away from Ubuntu-based distros and Nobara seems like it's focused on gaming (frequent updates, etc). It's been.. I dunno if great is the right word, but pretty good. I run into difficulties of some variety with almost everything I do (can't install battle.net in lutris because it hangs at 45%, lutris can't log into epic games store, etc), but I've also found solutions for them without too much trouble and the games that I have managed to install run great.