I feel you. I really do. User friendliness is what got me to try out Ubuntu in the first place. My Open Source OS journey has been long and weird, but we have that in common.
If you're looking for an OS with good documentation that's going to make your Steam gaming easier, I can suggest Nobara. It's easy to install, and while it's own documentation is a little sparse (it's less than a year or so old), you can use Fedora documentation 99% of the time. And as a bonus, steamtinkerlaunch is a one click install on Nobara. I think. I did my install for my gaming rig like 8 months ago, so don't quote me.
More importantly, though, is that Nobara has a friendly discord filled with helpful folks, including Glorious Eggroll himself - the guy who made Nobara, and a contributor to many Open Source projects and maintainer for Proton-GE which, if you use Steam on Linux, you might have heard of.
As a bonus, the Fedora community is helpful too, as evidenced by me 😀.
I was considering Linux mint, since its something new, but still on a familiar debian base and and familiarity with things like ppas which make getting software easier than compiling it.
but I'll read up more on Nobara. Just concerned that I'll be back to day 1 know nothing switching bases.
I'm a long time Debian user, and I switched to Fedora when 38 was released because I wanted to try something new and shiny (well, Gnome 44 mostly).
It was kind of disappointing. With Debian, I had to work to get it perfectly functional on my laptop. Fedora just... worked happily out of the box. Almost nothing to tweak.
I don't know the nature of your problems and solutions, but be assured that the knowledge you gained will still be useful. Nowadays most distros are more similar than they are different. I successfully used Arch Wiki and Arch Forums on Debian issues, because even if they are on the opposite ends of the spectrum, their building blocks are basically the same.
It's not that bad, really. Nobara is Fedora based, and has access to their large package base. Nobara's custom update tools are also excellent.
Fedora doesn't have PPAs, but it does have COPR, which is kinda like halfway between PPAs and Arch's AUR. Lots of packages. I hardly ever compile anything from source these days.
I feel you. I really do. User friendliness is what got me to try out Ubuntu in the first place. My Open Source OS journey has been long and weird, but we have that in common.
If you're looking for an OS with good documentation that's going to make your Steam gaming easier, I can suggest Nobara. It's easy to install, and while it's own documentation is a little sparse (it's less than a year or so old), you can use Fedora documentation 99% of the time. And as a bonus, steamtinkerlaunch is a one click install on Nobara. I think. I did my install for my gaming rig like 8 months ago, so don't quote me.
More importantly, though, is that Nobara has a friendly discord filled with helpful folks, including Glorious Eggroll himself - the guy who made Nobara, and a contributor to many Open Source projects and maintainer for Proton-GE which, if you use Steam on Linux, you might have heard of.
As a bonus, the Fedora community is helpful too, as evidenced by me 😀.
I was considering Linux mint, since its something new, but still on a familiar debian base and and familiarity with things like ppas which make getting software easier than compiling it.
but I'll read up more on Nobara. Just concerned that I'll be back to day 1 know nothing switching bases.
I'm a long time Debian user, and I switched to Fedora when 38 was released because I wanted to try something new and shiny (well, Gnome 44 mostly).
It was kind of disappointing. With Debian, I had to work to get it perfectly functional on my laptop. Fedora just... worked happily out of the box. Almost nothing to tweak.
I don't know the nature of your problems and solutions, but be assured that the knowledge you gained will still be useful. Nowadays most distros are more similar than they are different. I successfully used Arch Wiki and Arch Forums on Debian issues, because even if they are on the opposite ends of the spectrum, their building blocks are basically the same.
It's not that bad, really. Nobara is Fedora based, and has access to their large package base. Nobara's custom update tools are also excellent.
Fedora doesn't have PPAs, but it does have COPR, which is kinda like halfway between PPAs and Arch's AUR. Lots of packages. I hardly ever compile anything from source these days.
Okay okay, stop twisting my arm! :p
I'll back up my files and switch to Nobara as soon as I beat the game I'm playing, since I dont want to risk having that get borked again