I luckily remembered this link from a resource i stumbled across. There is a website called

www.thinkpenguin.com

It has several periferals and devices supported by linux that they sell.

As someone who runs VMs, i suggest you dont. Ivd been doing it for about 2 years and i still have moments where lets say i want to expand my storage and a bork it, or accidently removed a virt selection on virt manager by mistake.

An easy solution. Run conty.

https://github.com/Kron4ek/Conty

It creates a virtualized arch linux with all the needs for gaming without having you worry about the heavy stuff. All the list of programs already on the list including other launchers for other games.

Here is a video explaining it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yugKXXzAdqY

Most desktop enviornments work with most distros. There will be a selection of linux users that say it doesnt matter because though its true you can make any distro look like each other. The navigations can change depending on the distro you use. I agree with most of the comments here, since you are starting out, mint is a solid choice. You get the backings of ubuntu, + its very user frienldy. A gui for packages/drivers and good sweep of software for daily usage. Im using it now since my arc 380 gpu is supported on it to use as the host for my virtual machines. ( i virtualize other distros/BSD and windows [for those pesky windows only games/programs])

Do you want it to be persistent(all your stuff is saved) or you dont mind it starting fresh everytime you plug in to devices?

When i was still really noob to onward i have jumped from ubuntu, pop os, fedora, linux mint, debian, manjaro, artix, slackware.

I go back between distros from time to time but for a noob and support with out the box experience.

Linux mint is the choice to go, out the box:

• removed ubuntu snaps(snaps seem way too bloated for me)

• nvidia drivers are easy to install via gui

• docs are simple and easy to follow, i had jumped up 2 versions in an old thinkpad w/ nvidia quite easily.

• it does have display refresh rate changes.

• since its based off ubuntu it does have support for games as well.

• really user friendly

Stuff most linux distros have

• tinkering out the box, only a select few remove that to have the distro set to read only for user or are heavily integrated to work a certain way where tinkering is a pain.

• programming-you can setup it however you like for programming, via ide or through text editor such as vim/neovim etc

• vpn remote access for media- its supported in most if not all distros as well.

One thing i want to know is what your computer specs are, since wether a stable distro such as mint or rollin release such as an arch based will depend on your hardware.

As stable or user friendly fedora and debian are, their whole structure due to the way they setup their ecosystem including their package management differ in how to change things system wide as you dont want to go too heavy on it to avoid breaking, especially if you tinker things to where you conflict with its package manegment. Aka your configs vs apts/dnf package managers configs, at some point a conflict will occur to where you will need to fix it.

Slackware lack of package managers creates the initial issue of well now i got to manually take care of the dependencies. However in exchange, the packages are close to the way they were initially developed and your config system wide has significant less competition on what happens to your configs systemwide.

You can make your debian or fedora your system, however slackware gives you that initial power out of the box hence its superb stability + even if i make a mistake i find slackware to be more forgiving to fix the issue.

One last thing for slackware for its birthday celebration.

If anyone wants to join slackware, this is a link to a post in the community as i dont know how to link the community directly

https://lemmy.ml/post/2122159

I remember this from mastadon when i was searching slackware hashtag. Nice, congrats Slackware!

Had a low end laptop, i believe it was lubuntu that i installed because i knew ubuntu was too bloated for that laptop. However I was not aware that it used snap and running firefox kick started the fans on that old laptop. Resouce hog seen and searching for firefox direct binary from apt seemed like a chore so i replaced with mint. Snaps automatically i did not want to deal with for old computers. Was happy with mints removal of snaps and it is very user friendly.

Looks great, i tried the demo and it looks amazing. Defintley something to try out. Ive been meaning to find some alternative. Well done.

I started with for a bit awm, however i am giving qtile a try since im learning how to code python so good practice.