Thx in advice.
Nobara if you want to game or do AV editing. I’m a semi-noob and I did not like Mint.
Nobara is highly hacked together and not well maintained. It is a cool proof of concept but should not be used for daily usage.
Lol, but why? I use it for my daily usage! I game, surf the web, edit videos in Da Vinci and do a lot (a whole lot) of audio work on Reaper. It has been updated following the Fedora cycle and you easily switch from Gnome to KDE. If you go to the Discord you’ll see it is actually well maintained. Having tried a few distros, I settle for Nobara because it’s basically Fedora with all AV codecs and drivers pre-installed, exactly what I wanted. You may not like it personally but I don’t think it’s right to say it doesn’t work for daily usage.
Yeah for sure you can do that, but it is not secure.
Updates are extremely delayed and not CI/CD like for example ublue Bazzite.
It has disabled SELinux.
It uses a custom Kernel and tons of other stuff.
Its for sure cool but the performance increase is like 5% (TheLinuxExperiment tested that once) and not worth the issues.
I would use Bazzite instead, you can layer stuff or different things, ublue has a Resolve Podman container afaik. Reaper has no Wayland support, does it? Last time I tested it at least, a few months ago.
Cool that their releases are good, my knowledge was from the 38-39 upgrade which came months too late. But tbh Discord is not a good way to document, ublue does the same though.
I think your best bet for this is one of the spinoffs of enterprise Linux: fedora or openSUSE. both are very solid ootb, and have starting configurations that are generally good.
The microos or silverblue variants respectively are really promising as well, but still have some caveats.
Fedora is not an enterprise Linux spinoff, it is an upstream to an enterprise Linux distribution. Neither of those support proprietary video codecs and other potentially patent encumbered pieces out of the box, with some work for proprietary drivers too.
Fedora atomic GNOME or KDE.
You don’t mess with the system at all. If you look for something specific, you may find something here https://universal-blue.org/images/ .
Fedora
If you need secure boot on current (like intel gen 10+), Fedora Workstation. If you don’t need secure boot, Linux Mint.
Fedora has the easiest way to make secure boot just work, it will even dual boot fine on the same disk although you should still backup the m$ partition if you actually need it. Fedora can do secure boot even with Nvidia.
Ubuntu can do some of the secure boot stuff like Fedora does, and there is the advantage of the stable kernel if you have Nvidia.
Note that “stable” as a label has nothing to do with its intuitive meaning like alpha/beta/testing/crashing etc. It is a term for servers and people that want to run very specific setups that will not require human intervention on embedded devices and servers. If you want to game or use the latest sw “stable” might be a pain. However, if what you are running is not kept up to date with the latest packages and libraries, a stable release may be the only way to run your stuff.
Overall these are the biggest factors on current hardware; secure boot yes/no, and up-to-date software needs yes/no.
Mint is easy mode, but has no secure boot shim implemented. It makes gaming accessible.
Pop is made for System76 and does some stuff funny IMO, and is like Mint with no secure boot if you are not running 76’s proprietary bootloader on their hardware
Ubuntu is easy but has its quirks (most are fixed by Mint which is based on Debian/Ubuntu)
Debian is hard mode and is an advanced distro. There are a ton of tools that are unique to Debian. It is used mostly for people running their own servers and custom purpose machines from home or work. It is also the primary distro for hacking hardware and reverse engineering stuff that has no other way to create Linux kernel support.
Every distro has some things that they are specialized for. You can do almost anything with any of them, but it will depend on your skill level. Something to keep in mind here is that Linux is not a consumerism branding contest. We are not choosing our frivolous teams. This is the place where everyone can learn. While beginners and users are welcome, you will find many aspects of Linux are the study and thesis projects for many computer science students. All levels are present here. This is why so many options exist.
