manjaro, unless you can't handle the plethora of meme type people telling you it is terrible, and downvoting you as if they have a point.
It is the logical entry point if you want an arch base.
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=manjaro

garuda is also decent, some of their versions are over the top shiny, but mokka, and kde lite are much easier on the eye.
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=garuda

bluestar might also interest you, I have it installed, but haven't looked into it much yet.
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=bluestar

I would throw bazzite in as an option, especially for a new user.

Bazzite has a good out of the box experience, is meant for gaming, and it uses an immutable distro.

In my opinion the only reason people don’t like immutable distros is bad habits that are hard to break, or wanting highly custom system configurations, both do not apply to a new user. If you never go into the terminal there’s no difference, and if you do a system like brew works pretty well.

The advantage of an immutable system are that you can’t mess up your system and it’s more secure. It also stops you from doing dangerous things or leasing habits that require modifying system packages without knowing what they do.

For just gaming and desktop use (with KDE), it’s a good low maintenance system.

I landed on Fedora Gnome as my default choice unless I have a reason to go other. My wife finally stuck with Linux after trying Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, and Ubuntu Mate, then landing on Fedora KDE. (When I say trying, I mean me trying to get her to use it and then her abandoning the machine for Windows.) Fedora KDE stuck.

Manjaro has been awesome. I use it for work and it is pretty bulletproof.

My other laptop is using Arch (btw) so having the same de and package managers is awesome. The GUI software installer is pretty great for my wife, she never needs to open a terminal.

Caution, dual-boot means you have to power down your system before you can start the other, if you share any file systems. Hibernate and then booting another distro will result in file system damage.

The alternative would be a virtual machine.

It can also occasionally mess up the grub configuration, which means you have to reinstall grub.

If you want a good first Linux experience, stick with anything Ubuntu-/Debian-based; they are

• stable workhorses, i.e. they don't break on you as easily as rolling release distros like CachyOS.
• wildly popular, i.e. you'll find plenty of resources to help you get started (although, to be fair, the Arch wiki is also ridiculously detailed).

Whatever you do, steer clear of immutable distros like Bazzite for now. As cool as the concept is (I run Bazzite on my gaming machine) - as soon as you do something "non-standard" (and modding your Minecraft .jar with Optifine already qualifies as such), you'll have to fiddle with the terminal and distrobox containers, both of which will be alien concepts for you at the start and may be top much to make it a good first impression.

Between these two, Cachy.

If choice is open: Fedora.

"Gaming" focussed distros are often a worse choice imo, because they offer zero performance benefit, are bloated in an attempt to bundle drivers out of the box, are harder to troubleshoot because worse documentation, and the preinstalled configs can cause headaches.

Might just be my old experience (happy to learn otherwise) but dual booting ended up with more of a painful experience than not. When Windows would update, it would fuck my grub up and cause issues booting into Linux and Windows. You can fix it (most of the time) but expect to do it rather often; especially unpleasant as a beginner.

I know there's issues with GPU passthrough on vms but IDK if dual booting is the moves unless they seriously improved the experience in the last couple years.

In my opinion vanilla Fedora is the best beginner distro. And once you get comfortable with Linux you can try Arch, CashyOS, rpm-ostree based distros or anything else.

Try Debian, nut ubuntu, it just makes problems

Gotcha! Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me :D

Well, I tend to give it a lot of room. Yesterday I tested CachyOS with 24 GB of RAM, 4 CPU Cores and running iso from M.2 and it is slow. Idk if it's maybe a host to vm relation issue instead of a VM hardware issue, since the VM doesn't have trouble loading, instead it's more of a slow-to-show the host what's happening inside the VM. Idk if I'm making any sense haha

Seems like for the moment Cachy is winning over Ubuntu by far hahah. Thanks!

Noted🫡

That's what I'll do, thanks!

The majority of issues I've had are around the GPU (debian Nvidia drivers) and not that much due to proton.
I'll check that proton custom anyways. Thanks!

That's useful, I'll have it in mind when booting. Thank you!

Very useful insight, thanks!

Looks sooo damn solid tbh, I'll check it out more deeply. Sadly it doesn't match my needs since the color grading aspect requires some niche characteristics that for the moment (and honestly seems like in the future too) kdenlive doesn't support, and doesn't have much reasons to do it, of course. Thank you anyways!

I distrohopped to end up with it a few years ago, and distrohopped again this year, it's still the only one that ticks the boxes for me. Never had any issues with it, on 3 systems.

Pretty similar path indeed hahah. Thank you very very much!

Very interesting. I saw a video of a DaVinci Resolve user recommending Manjaro to run it, so it adds up. Thanks!

Sounds very very good. I'll definitely give it some priority. Thank you!

Woah, didn't know that about grub. I hardly understand what it is, so it leaves me with a question: I don't know if that makes any sense or goes directly against the nature of the bootloader definition but, can I switch one OS's bootloader to Limine (got told by another user that grub failed for him with Cachy and switching to Limine solved it) and the other still be grub?

That's very helpful, I'll totally have that in mind🫡

You can chain-load bootloaders but I am sceptical whether more complexity is helpful. At lesst grub is relatively easy to reinstall.

This quite represents the point where I'm at. I'm prioritizing CachyOS (although there are countersides and other gaming-focused OS's that can end up being better for me) but got recommended Fedora multiple times by now, so, we'll see, maybe I end up choosing Fedora. Thank you!

I'll try not to dual-boot unless it's the only way; first I'll stress all options inside LMDE (with makeresolvedeb, VMs, distrobox(?), etc.) and if it still doesn't solve the issues I'm having in LMDE, I'll dual-boot (preparing for these cases of course). Thanks!

I'll have that in mind, thanks!

I'll leave Debian for when I switch from LMDE, because I think I'll still have the same issues I'm reporting on LMDE. Thank you anyways!

Ok, I'll stick to just grub or Limine if it assures more stability, I guess it would be overcomplicating it for nothing. Thanks!

Hm... LMDE is Debian under the hood, so if you have non standard requirements then you have to be flexible to make something to work, combining .deb repositories with other solutions like flatpaks, distrobox, compiling from source, nix, guix, appimages, wine prefixes, etc. Just don't mess with system directories and libraries and you're good.

Maybe Mint were a better choice to a newbie, but in the end it's almost the same thing with some nice driver utilities. Look for the release in December.

It never even occured to me to hibernate and then switching OS. I just use a command to reboot and tell grub to preselect the other OS and go do something else for 60 seconds while it reboots.

It's true that sometimes the grub config gets messed up, but in two years doing this, I've had to reinstall grub once (many more times if you count me distro-hopping).

In my opinion the only reason people don’t like immutable distros is bad habits that are hard to break, or wanting highly custom system configurations, both do not apply to a new user

Disagree with the second point. The first thing I did when I finally swapped was to fiddle with it until it felt like what I was used to with Windows. Of course, that's also the same thing I do in a Windows PC: Make it feel like an older less shit version of Windows.

Over time, I started experimenting. Even use a heavily modified Gnome for my laptop which is a big change. Maybe I just like to mess with stuff.

Definitely Fedora. It needs a bit of setting up, but otherwise has awesome security and rather recent packages.

But you can still theme the hell out of plasma and it will just save to your ~/.local or something, that doesn’t need to hit the system packages.

I am curious if you have examples when you needed something that didn’t work with bazzite, as my opinions are opinions that can be changed

Personally I found Fedora atomic really good for being able to update the rpm os tree if you do want to tweak heavily, but I found fedora without dnf was not a good place (it works with brew, but they don’t include it and I think they still push toolbx, which is great, but not a casual user system).

They're talking about dual-booting Windows and Linux. Dual-booting two Linuxes (Lini?) should be fine.

Install Ubuntu and see if you can get your games and video editing software to work. If you can't, go for CachyOS.

Why Ubuntu first? Because millions of people have been using it for years. When something breaks, you'll be able to fix it because someone else would have already encountered this issue before and reported it.

Thanks! Very useful!

My experience with Ubuntu desktop has always been a real poor one but I realize other people like it. I'd go with cachy or endevourOS personally. My wife has probably less technical skill than you do and I've had her on endevourOS for nearly a year at this point. All she does is YouTube and gaming and it all runs near flawlessly. I also have both our systems dual booted but I also can't remember the last time I booted into windows for either machine.

Between those two, CachyOS for sure. You are already running LMDE, imo there is zero benefit to dual-booting with Ubuntu... You are likely going to be running into the exact same problems you already are.

The biggest problem with Linux distros is choice paralysis. I’d recommend Fedora/(K/X)Ubuntu/Mint as a first choice.

Fedora is very up to date, so if you’re giddy to try new desktop environment updates (like gnome, KDE, not Cosmic until it’s more mature), then go Fedora with the spin you think you’ll like the most, visually.

Ubuntu is updated all at once every year/2 years or so. By the time an update reaches Ubuntu, it’s already old news. It’s much more stable because there’s less to diagnose, and everything is essentially worked out before it hits your PC.

Mint is Ubuntu, but heavily modified with user friendly changes in mind. From what I’ve seen though, the default theme is really dated, visually, and may not have creature comforts (I haven’t used mint in over a decade).

Bazzite is for you if you are afraid to brick your computer with a stray terminal command; it’s designed to be very resilient to beginner mistakes by taking away root access from the user.

CachyOS/Endevour (Arch based) are great distros, but you’ll be given a laundry list of choices for everything from your web browser, desktop environment, terminal, shell, file browser, and more. If you’re new to Linux, there’s simply too much choice for things you won’t understand yet. Even if you’re into customization, you’re better off trying one of the above as a baseline and going down the customization rabbit hole from there!

Debian stable. You'll be fine.

When I first looked into linux, I found heaps of recommendations for ubuntu, mint, zorin, pop, and fedora, but none of them seemed right (for various reasons), so I distrohopped until I found something that made sense. It's easy enough if you use ventoy, and if you have a spare drive, or even enough space on a drive to make some 50GB (ish) ext4 partitions. Even easier if using 2.5" sdd's since you can very easily disconnect your windows drive to avoid potential weirdness.

I don't use da vinci resolve, it doesn't sound linux friendly, aside from on rocky os (which I know nothing about)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DaVinci_Resolve

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=rocky

The usual option is to look for alternatives to da vinci, such as kdenlive. Alternatives are not always of interest, or considered viable for some users of course.

I was between CachyOS and Bazzite and decided for Bazzite for being a more stable and hassle free OS from what I read, because it's not a rolling distro with frequent updates that may break something. I went all in, deleting my Windows partition and am pretty happy with it ao far. I do have Affinity and Concepts that are windows only and I'm using VirtualBox for those.