Hot take

I have used Fedora for nearly all the time I've daily driven Linux, and haven't encountered any problem that a newbie would encounter and couldn't overcome, excluding distro-agnostic stuff. Yeah, the h264 shit sucks, but if you use flatpaks you shouldn't have to worry about it. And if you ever have to face SELinux, then you're probably doing something that's beyond beginner level.

I dunno, I picked RedHat 5.2 as a complete beginner along with fvwm95 and afterstep, and that worked out okay. Of course, that was 25 years ago.

It's a very rough guide I threw together. There's all sorts of wedge cases you could use to argue against it. E.g. you could use RPMs on slack Linux. Not exactly user friendly.

Bit on the whole fedora or Suse do the job.

Also desktops are better for newbies. I thought I'd mentioned that but yeah I agree deffo better for newbies while WM managers more for tinkerers/power users.

I started on CentOS and don't remember any issues but that was a long time ago. I flirted with Suse, Ubuntu, and Arch when RH started being a super dick. I finally settled on Rocky, rpm is the devil I know.

Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu and its forks such as Mint) uses dpkg and APT (APT does all the communicating with repositories, dependency managment etc, dpkg actually installs and removes packages.) Aptitude is a TUI front-end for APT that gives you a menu-based system in the terminal. Synaptic (not to be confused with the trackpad driver) is a GUI front-end for APT.

I game on Linux Mint. Now it might be my tendency to play single player and/or cooperative multiplayer (think Stardew Valley or Unrailed!) games often made by smaller studios and indie developers as most of the AAA space has otherwise offended me, but...I don't really have a problem. The vast majority of things just install and run from Steam.

The package manager is usually tied to the distro, but the point above is to let the package manager inform your distro choice.

You'll notice a running theme in my lecture here is "choice." You can switch Desktop Environment and other stuff on just about any distro and make it feel like yours. Switching package managers isn't recommended though! 😅

So for instance, Arch (btw lol), or Manjaro, or Endeavour use Pacman.

I've switched to Endeavour recently which is essentially "User-friendly Arch-based" with an installer and stuff, and it's absolutely lovely for games. My old 960M laptop runs plenty of stuff great. :D

On my main rig I've used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for years, which is also a rolling release (constantly updated) distro that technically uses RPMs, but uses its own package manager called Zypper, which I find mostly user friendly. Packages are also a bit more thoroughly tested.

Both use KDE Plasma desktop environment and it's gorgeous.

Alternatively, especially for laptops with hybrid Nvidia graphics, POP!_OS is alright if you're okay with GNOME desktop environment. (You can always change, but it's geared toward GNOME). It used Aptitude, and the updates trail behind a bit, but generally that's supposed to make a more stable system.

(Note that when I say "lags behind", latest security fixes tend to be backported, but you won't see fancy new shiny features as fast.)

For gaming specifically though:

Win10 is gonna be my last Windows. 11 is invasive and opinionated, and 12 is gonna have a forced Ai fetish. Gross.

Good news: Steam games work wonderfully. Thanks to advances with Proton and all their support for the SteamDeck (which runs Linux btw!)

For other platforms, look into Heroic Launcher, which takes a lot of the headache out of managing stuff like GOG games. :)

With rolling releases you usually want to update cautiously and check news updates and stuff, because newer versions aren't as thoroughly tested and some stuff might break...but you get new features faster so that's fun.

That being said: If you're willing to learn a little as you go, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a big win in my book for getting the latest fun stuff while still being stable! It's also thoroughly security-minded.

And by default, it includes "Snapper" set up for you, so you can just roll the system back to a working version in the rare case something goes wrong. You can install snapper on any distro, but it comes pre-configured and ready to go, as long as you use the default "BTRFS" file system.

I won't get into filesystems because hoo boi...but TL;DR: BTRFS allows "snapshots" and rollbacks that don't require literally doubling your disk space for rolling back, so it's a great safety net.

That being said: ALWAYS have more than one backup, in multiple locations, of anything you find important!

Good luck and have fun. I will say, Endeavour, OpenSUSE, and Pop_OS all have great communities that are eager to help if you're eager to learn! :)

I'd say, just use Ubuntu if gaming is your main concern.

Imo the main problem for games are 1. hardware drivers (afaik only if you have brand new hardware), 2. game launchers (fuck those fucking game launchers, fuck; except steam) and 3. anti- cheat software.

Otherwise gaming is really good under Linux nowadays.

Steam on linux has tons of games. But not all of them (Baulder's Gate 3.)