linuxmemes

A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

Whatever you go for, make sure drivers are up to date. Anything pulling directly from the Debian repos requires manual installation for Nvidia drivers later than v525.x.x.

Not that doing so is hard, its just tedious and tbh I don't expect the average new user to have a firm enough grasp of everything going on to handle it smoothly.

Mint is fine. Some people like Fedora, but its sluggish on some hardware. I'm a fan of my arch Based distributions personally, but I don't recommend pure arch to a newbie (endeavor maybe, but even then expect to do a ton of reading)

If you're looking for something to tinker and learn with, something more advanced might be good.

I usually recommend something that is immutable if you're looking for a set and forget system that won't require much (if any) tinkering.

In my house we use Arch, LMDE, and FreeBSD (do not recommend unless you prefer to live at a terminal)

Fedora is absolutely the better choice between those two. Much bigger community, more suited for desktop use in the first place (CentOS is more of a server OS), frequent updates, great starting point for modern hardware. You may also consider a modified one like Bazzite or Nobara if you have an nvidea GPU (because they have drivers built-in).