Don’t wait. Experiment now in a VM to learn the basics.

MintLinux and Pop!OS are normally the two front-runners for new users. Basically, if you use Steam and you don’t play online-only games with bad implementations of anti-cheat software, you are good to game on either.

Make a USB that you can “live boot” from, so you can test out how they work with your hardware. Generally spearking, Mint works better with AMD, and Pop! works better with Nvidea.

Here’s the official basic guide for Mint:
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

And here’s the official basic guide for Pop!:
https://support.system76.com/articles/install-pop/

Linux Mint

Please see username

Basically, you should choose your distro according to the available UIs (DesktopEnvironments) as well as the philosophy and back-end configuration of the distribution.

UI (desktop environments):

• KDE (Windows like)
• Gnome (MacOS like)
• XFCE (very barebones, windows like)
• Cinnamon (also windows like)
• CosmicDE (comming soon, mix of KDE and Gnome)

Distros:

• Fedora: very stable yet a very progressive philosophy (usually implement major changes first). Comes in Gnome, KDE and other variants (spins)
• PopOS!: “Just works” distro, great for NVidia cards. Currently still using Gnome but will soon switch to CosmicDE.
• ArcoLinux: If you want something beginner-friendly but want to be able to change everything later. Extremely flexible, comes in many flavours like Gnome, KDE, …

not here to recommend a specific distro, I’m sure your experience will largely be familiar between the popular recommendations here.

I think you will be pleasantly surprised at just how good gaming on Linux is right now. You’ll probably find that contemporary AAA titles perfom better than on win10/11.

I find that Linux is the best place to play older windows games. You don’t get fucked over by annoying exclusive fullscreen behaviour messing with your desktop when you tab out, for example.

Shit really just works. It’s a great time.

Ubuntu or one of its derivatives like Mint or PopOS.

Fedora is pretty good too but is a little more cutting edge, essentially a beta test for Red Hat Enterprise Linuxs new features. Good stuff, is what I use, but also occasionally breaks things and requires some insight into linux. Still pretty polished and user friendly tho.

Play with Fedora or Ubuntu for a while and then explore other distros.

Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. It’s designed to make the transition easy. The menus and taskbar are all in the same place as you’d expect them on Windows. There’s the usual set of documents/pictures/downloads folders. The interface is good-looking and polished like you’re used to, too.

Why wait?

I’d start with Pop!OS or Linux Mint. They both are beginner friendly.

Especially Pop runs well with NVIDIA GPUs. AMD is no problem on either.

I personally think that Pop has the best out of the box, everything is just running, experience.

First of all I recommand that no matter what distribution you get, that you should get one that has KDE as desktop environment as it looks mostly like windows and that would make it easy for you to get used to it.

As for what distro to use well that depends. While searching for info on how to do things when I first went to Linux most posts that I found were for Ubuntu.

Which was annoying as I did not want Ubuntu and I was using Mangaro and later went to Arch.

Manjaro is based on Arch so you can use documentați and forum answers from both Manjaro and Arch. Also Arch has very good documentation but it’s a little too technical for someone that just started using Linux and might confuse you more then answer your questions.

My recomandation would be Manjaro but Ubuntu seems to be easier to find info for!

I also recommend to use ChatGPT or better yet the edge specific ChatGPT(as it is connected to the internet) for answer to problems you have encountered. It’s not perfect but it’s very helpful.

If you do not have a friend to help you along the way, use the Linux Mint Cinnamon edition first. Download it now and use it in a VM to get used to it.

If you’re feeling confident and would like to explore further, install Debian with GNOME or KDE. I suggest Debian because it’s a large and independent distribution, community-built, rock solid stability, convenient or powerful as needed, and stays true to “the standards” (like the stock GNOME) and free software, but doesn’t prevent you from installing proprietary software as needed. I moved all my friends who were willing to switch to Linux with zero experience to Debian (3 in total), but they had me to help and I didn’t have to do anything after assisting the installation and the first day configuration. Now they’re all independent, using it daily and never ask me for help.

Fedora is also a good option, but every release has only 1 year of support while Debian has at least 3 years and Mint has 5.

I’m doing the same tbh. It’s gonna be great (and painful) I have my scope trained at nobara

All the suggestions here are good, but actually Puppy Linux is also a good start. Try their latest BookwormPup64 release, it is very polished, solidly build, and most importantly small enough to install on you usb pendrive. Puppy linux runs in your ram, so it is super fast even on old basic hardware.

Give it a try… I start using puppy after my pc crashed… Never look back to windoz since then…

Arch Linux, gnome/KDE for desktop. Wiki is extensive, packages and updates are cutting edge .

There is endeavour os (arch based) which I hear is good