I have heard good things about nobara. I don't mind doing a little thinkering to have things work but I also don't want to spend hours doing recharch on how to fix things.
Edit: thanks for giving input everyone. I will try Linux mint and if it does not go well will give nobara a go instead.
Edit part two I had to boot mint in compatibility mode because I got black screen for like 15+ minutes and then I couldn't get it to see more than one monitor and 3 hours later gave up....Just put on nobara will load mint to my laptop and try to learn more because I want to but also tryna game :) you will hear more from me
I'd strongly recommend to stick to a mainstream distribution like Fedora, Debian, Mint,...
With bigger distributions you have more people working on them (-> more packages well maintained), you get a bigger community, and therefore it's easier to get help if anything breaks.
I'm not sure which distribution to recommend though, as they all have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to gaming. Ten years ago I have switched to Gentoo (which is definitely not a distribution for new Linux users) when I got fed up with Ubuntu's Enshittification, and have stayed there ever since, so I lost a bit track which distributions are good for gaming now and which aren't.
This might be my misunderstanding but when you say mainstream distribution what do you mean. My understanding is mint is built on Ubuntu similar to how nobara is built on fedora. So for example if something broke or I wanted to something on mint I can follow Ubuntu instructions (kind of) and follow fedora for nobara? Sorry if this is dumb question
It's not a dumb question at all, and there is no "agreed upon" definition.
For me the most important characteristics of a "Mainstream Distribution" would be the size of their maintainer team - though that is also inaccurate if we are talking about distributions that are built on top of other distributions - as in your example.
Another indication is to check who is sponsoring a distribution's development. If there are plenty of commercial sponsors, then chances are that the distribution is well maintained. Similarly, if the distribution is created by a commercial company (Intel, Canonical, RedHat,...), as those companies also have an interest in keeping their product in a good state.
Age of the distribution might be another indicator. If a distribution has been around for a long time, chances are it isn't bad either.
However, I am lazy and would not actually check any of this by hand. Instead, the thing I would actually do is to just go to https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major and read through their list. 😉
I'm using Linux Mint with an Nvdia card and it works great. But I don't have a completely new PC so I don't need the latest of the latest stuff. Taking your hardware into account is always a good idea.
My advice: don't switch too fast, maybe keep dual boot at first and give yourself time to learn. Try distros with a live USB stick on your system to see if it works. For the look and feel consult https://distrosea.com/ and play around. Linux can be fun and it's serving gamers very well now (for the most part - there are games that won't run mostly due to invasive rootkit 'anti-cheats').
Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and (to a lesser extent) Fedora are basically THE best "desktop" distros. They support a range of desktop evnironments but are mostly built around "just working". If you are coming from windows, you can't really do wrong with KDE Plasma or (Linux Mint) Cinnamon as both of those are "more Windows than Windows" as they heavily crib from the vista/7 era. But even whatever the current default Ubuntu desktop environment is called at this point is fine.
So it mostly boils down to what GPU you have.
- AMD? Any of the above
- nVidia? Mint and Ubuntu make this trivial as they have a nice GUI method to turn on the proprietary (so "good") nvidia drivers. Fedora involves a few terminal commands and seems a lot more prone to getting borked and needing to reinstall the drivers. But I run Fedora with nvidia and have zero concerns.
- Intel? May Erastil protect you.
Personally? I use Fedora with KDE Plasma for my desktop OS. While I am not huge on either, I vastly prefer flatpaks to snaps for app delivery. And I have a lot of concerns with how Canonical/Ubuntu is handling update cadences as a way to promote their enterprise OS.
But also? The beauty of Linux is that it is trivial to reformat. And the best thing you can do is just distro hop a bit for the first month or so. Install Mint. If you find something bothering you, look at what distro does that better and install that. New distro a piece of shit? Embrace Fedora. And so forth.
The reason so many of us get rather tribal about our distro or desktop environment is because we chose them. In the Windows space, you get cranky and hope Microsoft undo something you hate in the next five years (or you install sketchy third party plugins that never work). In the Linux space? You find out that a bunch of people also hate that clippy went away and built an entire distro around support for clippy like behavior. Or whatever.
If you put a bit of effort in you can even re-use your home directory and lose zero data. Although, personally, I have never had the patience for that. Games go on dedicated drives that migrate between installs. And personal documents get backed up to my NAS. So a reformat is just wiping the OS drive, installing the new distro, and then spending a minute or two to figure out what weird ass name an app I like is in the package manager.
I would take that one step further and recommend an atomic release: like fedora silverblue or kinoite for someone new to Linux. The read only base filesystem makes the risk of breaking things basically zero.
It does make some tutorials invalid though, which can be a source of frustration.
I generally don't like atomic/immutable distros outside of an enterprise environment. Odds are you will never run into anything that will bother you... until you do.
Conceptually? I think they are The Future. But I still tend to encourage people to use a more "normal" distro to start with and then migrate if they find problems.
In general, pick big well supported distros.
Smaller more specific distros like Nebara may sound good, but if there are issues, you will have to wait a long time for a small team to fix them, or work it out yourself.
All standard distros can be used for gaming, you may need to find a way to pull in the latest kernel/drivers/packages if you want thr most optimises experience though.
