Okay so after reading a bit more on the distros talked about in this thread I will be trying out the following
Ubuntu based PoP OS
Fedora
Maybe Debian with some back porting, thanks for the tip her @imhigh.today
I will also be looking at arch just for the sake of it. Could learn something useful from it.
Thanks to everyone for the recommendations and comments so far. This post is open for all recommendations and suggestions
After you get it rolling, there’s really no issue for other users. Update it and install software yourself, she’ll never know the difference.
My biggest concern is mostly that it is a rolling release. The few times I have tried it and then updating, it broke. That is my only major concern about arch. From what I could find it’s not recommended for general use but I could be completely wrong as time has changed. How is your experience with it so far?
Ill throw out ZorinOS. Im new to Linux myself and Zorin is basically like PopOS in that it is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. However Zorin looks and feels much more Windows like so the transition was easy for me. It does all the same things though, so its really down to what visual style you want the interface to be. Pop was just too colorful and “look we have futuristic fancy icons” for my tastes. I like more subdued visuals. I dont really like RGB’s all over my PC hardware and peripherals, and PopOS felt like the RGB version to me.
It’s been fine. Gaming PC has been wonderful with it, as I only have sunshine and maybe something else from the AUR. Everything else on it is just straight out of the repos and pretty much maintenance-free so far (knock on wood)
Laptop I’ve put all sorts of stuff from the AUR, and had to fix PKGBUILDS, or in some cases regretted getting the -git instead of the -bin and having to recompile things all the time… If you stay out of the weeds, it should be pretty painless. Overall, I have much appreciated the AUR for not having to wait around to get bugfixes and new software, or else go through the trouble of getting things off github and then maintaining them manually. I’ve had to play around to fix things on occasion.
The PC’s running our TVs are on plain old Ubuntu, though (would probably be Debian if I were doing it over again.) They do not do anything fancy other than web browser or occasionally moonlight or mythtv.
I use Manjaro for this use case. Compared to stock arch it’s supposedly more stable. There were some adaptiation pains coming from Windows, copy-paste is still a bit annoying, but beyond that, I don’t mind and it seems to do everything I need it to.
I have tried Manjaro once, the only reason was because they nuked the AUR twice!.
It seems like they have good intentions for what they want but they seem to lack some control when they nuke the AUR twice already.
I rarely have a opinion on linux stuff but that was just out of the world.
Beside it seems like a good OS, just that they tend to nuke with changes that wasn’t QA at all. Might just be my experiance with them.
When it comes to gaming I am even lazier - I just download conty.sh on any distro and that is basically it. I am gaming on a pure 64-bit Slackware without any problems.
It’s what Steam technically officially supports and OBS’ official package is for, so it’s as good a start as any. I just never warmed up with Ubuntu. The couple times I used it, it broke within days and one time a dist upgrade somehow landed on the wrong partition … ??? IDK how that is even possible, but w/e.
I’m also generally not a fan of apt but that’s subjective.
Been using the KDE spin for a good 7 years now and never had any major issues.
2 things to consider:
If you want to game and record using OBS, I would not recommend this. Mints packages are just too old for this and in the OBS and Lutris support chats we see time and again people having issues with old dependencies.
Neither are distro packages, so that point is pretty moot.
Out of the 3 distros above Fedora is probably the most likely to be ready for it out of the box. Fedora 41 and 42 already ship Mesa 25 which is required, and out of the 3 it has the most recent kernels.
I would recommended using what you know, it will probably lead to he least hassle, and friction. Having started linux on Ubuntu it will always be my go to Debian distro simply due to how well i know it.
However i have become an Arch fan the last few years, using Arch is easy assuming you didn’t miss installing something. its really no different than many other distors by the time you install plasma or gnome. Arch is hard when you forgot or didn’t know about that elusive package that some other distro installed for you. Like forgetting to install CUPS so you can print, because Arch makes no assumptions and does nothing for you(although they did finally make an installer).
At least the distro maintainers are packaging it? If its Fedora or Ubuntu, it would feel more trustworthy vs randos on the flathub?
Distro maintainers are also just… randos in a sense, as in, you don’t know them either.
Flathub goes through a review process just like distro packages and if you want to make a package on Flathub you need to apply for a repo. Anyone can apply, doesn’t mean that it’s granted.
I had the impression that distro package maintainership has a higher standard of vetting vs flathub.
I mean if we are going prevent malicious actors like that Jia Tan incident in xz but then again, that was way higher upstream. So I dont know anymore.
The goto easy-life desktop distros to recommend are ubuntu or fedora, it’s always one or the other, simply because they both have very large install bases so other people find and get the bugs ironed out not you. Fedora has quicker updates so is preferred if you have newer hardware, TBH Fedora is my preference anyway it’s so nice to have updated kernels and toolchains with no effort on my part. Ubuntu sometimes is preferred just because some things (for example intel’s compute platform NEO) only officially target Ubuntu with binaries and leave everyone else to fend for themselves with the sourcecode, which is fine but not the easiest route.
Sounds like with your use case you could easily go either way. In the end the main difference will be are you typing apt update && apt upgrade or dnf update?
Anything that regards maintainers is always a question of blind trust.
There is no way around it. This system is build upon trust between maintainers and devs. There was the uni in US that is still banned till this day for what a group of students did by abusing the system. It ended up that the UNI in question is banned from submitting any to the linux kernel. (University of Minnesota) was the name of the UNI that really did something they should not have.
I personally use Fedora for personal browsing and nobara (a fedora that has been tuned for gaming) for my htpc. Mint wouldn’t be bad either, but this is also a good note
Can work if you like a OS philosophy that is declarative. Main advantage is that if setup properly it should be up and running on a new machine pretty easily
I am slowly trying it out at work, but it has a pretty steep learning curve
I think mint is probably the path of least resistance personally. It has some disadvantages but is maybe an easier digest. There is an ubuntu lts based version or a debian based version. I tend to stick with the ubuntu version for simplicity of use. Others have disagreed because of older packages, and theres likely truth to that, but its worth a shake anyway.
Arch is pretty good if you understand what you want from a software standpoint, but it seems like you dont yet, and so I wouldnt recommend it unless you enjoy the tinkering. It has an installer now but you really should try to install from scratch once so you understand the process. Something will break inevitably, but fixing it can be straighforward if you have the knowledge from doing it ‘the hard way’. If you can figure out arch, it can be extremely rewarding with modern features and flexibility to run any software. I wont discourage anyone from trying to run arch, but it seems antithetical to what you’re looking for right now.
Unironically debian sid is also good IMO. I have yet to experience any real breakage despite the ‘unstable’ label. I feel this is a good middle ground option when you want less breakage than Arch but more modern software than stable or ubuntu lts. Considering you’re used to debian already, why fix what isnt broken?
Mixed use = ubuntu
Post had been updated with more and new info. My brain is a mess so sorry for the post being a mess in general.
I don’t know if it has been suggested yet but if you want an OS that’s as easy as possible, stable and great for gaming/streaming then I think you need to check out Bazzite KDE.