Linux

General computing: Mint, PopOS

Gaming: Nobara,PoP OS

I can recommend Mint, it's fantasically easy and stable, but take a look at https://distrochooser.de

Personally, I think your choice of desktop environment have more impact to your day-to-day experience than your distro choice. If you feel at home with windows-like UI, try KDE Plasma. If you like minimalistic mac-like interface, then try Gnome.

I'll comment and agree with most of the people who have already commented who recommend Linux Mint. It's very good for beginners. Alternatively, you can also take a quiz found at distrochooser.de to get an idea of which distros may be right for you.

Before you leave W10, install it in a VM or dual boot so you can test it/get used to the interface

What games do you play?

You should try a bunch and see what you really like! The beauty of Linux is there's so much out there that you'll almost definitely find one that gels with you.

A good place to start is Linux mint! The best way I can describe it is a blend of all the best parts of windows 7, 10 and 11 with very few of the downsides. You'll almost definitely settle in quickly and you might never want to switch as it's very full featured, snappy and well put together. It was designed for people wanting that Linux experience while still feeling familiar to windows users.

Another one to try if you love customisability is ZorinOS. There's a free and paid tier, both of which are excellent with the free tier offering layouts for old and new windows and Mac like experience and the paid tier (only around £30 for a lifetime licence) has layouts and customisability for absolutely everything else and extra tools and options for those that want more of that!

Food for thought: you should start getting familiar with Linux, either with Virtualbox/VMware, or dual booting right now. When the time comes and Win10 reaches EOL, you know you will find reasons to just go with the flow and stay with Microsoft.

As for what flavor? There are a few that come to mind as "windowy": Zorin, Mint, and the anything that uses KDE Plasma. Personally, I prefer Pop!_OS because I use MacOS as well and prefer that feel to windows a bit more, and System76 has done a fantastic job of making a polished product.

That's what I did, anyway. The mental load of still having windows to fall back on if I couldn't do something helped make the anxiety lighter and also helped me be motivated to try new things out. I couldn't imagine having to learn something with a gun to my head!

Personally I use Debian stable but I'd recommend starting with Ubuntu if you are new. I'm using linux fulltime since 2008 if that makes any difference.

The reason is you are guaranteed to find support for a program if there is a linux version.

Most of the instructions online have specific Ubuntu instructions.

The default install is quite user friendly.

You will have access to more packages than many other linux distros. You still have flatpak too if your desired package is not in the Ubuntu repository ( or snap store).

You can always pick a different one later once you have some experience under your belt.

Doing this you will be able to become familiar with APT the Debian package manager. Used in Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian and other Debian derivatives.

Getting the concepts here you can then just learn the differences if you switch distro such to an RPM (Different package format) based distro such as fedora.

In short use Ubuntu for now. Experiment and read up about it so you can build your knowledge. We are a community that like to share and learn. Also as a general rule backup your files before you install it and after you have set it up how you want. You can easily just copy the whole home directory for this 😉

The distro doesnt matter but it should not get in your way. They can all be made to look and act the same for the most part. The focus should be on knowledge. Linux is like digital Lego you can pick and choose the parts you like and layer them together.

I'm also going to say Linux Mint but I'll request using the debian edition. It would be better to wean off Ubuntu earlier for all of us.

I think it depends on what you are looking for. While Linux Mint is a safe option, it does have some drawbacks... well it's more drawbacks from Ubuntu but as Linux Mint is based off of it, it's also impacted. Primarily the fact that Ubuntu packages are terribly out of date. Thankfully mint makes adding PPA's painless, but for apps that don't have a PPA it's a pain to install them from scratch like Mangohud. It's not impossible, but there is an expect level of Linux knowledge which is required before going in.

Another option is Manjaro. You will hear the litany of endless criticism about it from the community, some of it is valid. But for the most part, while it's not as nice as Linux Mint, I think the OS will get you to the point where you can start using your machine faster. Mostly thanks to Arch's rolling release, as well as the AUR for filling the gap between official packages and flatpaks.

I was using Manjaro for the longest time, but switched to Mint due to a freak bootloader accident. I prefer Manjaro in terms of how well it handled Games and Windows software due to it's association with Arch. But I like how well Mint manages my laptop's battery and performance or lack thereof due to it's pitiful cooler.

TIL Win10 is the modern-day XP. And Win11 is the modern-day Vista.

Half the fun of switching to Linux is exploring all of the different flavours to find what you like best.

Pop OS is great because of up to date kernel and drivers, and they even have a specific version created for nvidia gpus, on disadvantage is that gnome version is a bit old, but its very stable at least

Hannah Montana Linux:

https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/

I'd recommend Zorin. It has a UI similar to windows, easy to get into, great defaults, and being based on Ubuntu, most help on the internet will work just fine

Linux Mint is great, I used it as a daily driver in college on an old IBM T42, however, modern Linux on a modern PC -- Debian/Ubuntu with KDE.

Basically, Kubuntu.

Kubuntu gets you off the ground running with Debian core, KDE Plasma, which is familiar to the Windows workflow and all the compatibility of Debian/Ubuntu. Steam and Proton work FLAWLESSLY via Vulkan API. Zero loss of performance.

If you want to spend a ton of time relearning an OS/tinkering however, get some flavor of Arch.

The AUR is crazy, it's like a huge software library and the Wiki is expansive, BUT, you will be relearning absolutely everything.

Sorry other Linux people, I'm a jaded lifelong Windows user, who unironically uses Kubuntu and Artix on seperate machines.

I'm impressed there isn't yet anyone who's suggesting arch btw and dead serious about it.

But Pop!_OS without a doubt.

I recently went over to fedora. Love it so far. Really stable and also newer packages than e.g. linux mint.

There are lots of tutorials for something like Debian or Ubuntu..

Mint is what I have used to introduce people to Linux and so far only good responses. I also recommend Debian and Debian derivatives.

I'd second Mint as well (I've used it for many years now). Out of interest, what games are you thinking of? Most of them should work out of the box, but with some there can be issues especially with multiplayer ones.

I’d say go with kde as you DE. Personally I like opensuse tumbleweed.

Opensuse gives a lot of „windows like“ features like control panel etc.

Everyone has different opinions. In the end the different versions, or distributions, are basically the same.

It starts with the Linux vernal, that as far as I know, handles communication with the hardware, and things like directories, storage, users, permissions. On top of that, every distribution creator puts a destropenvioment, like gnome or KDE (plasma?). Gnome is kinda like Mac is, KDE can be what ever you want, very customizable.

Than there is the package manager. Fedora for example uses yum or dnf (dnf is the new version I think) and Ubuntu uses apt. The package manager is like your app store, that you access over the command line. It is managed by the owners and ist mostly safe to download anything. (Installing Spotify would by 'sudo apt/dnf install spotify'. So pretty easy to use.

On top of that the distribution has preinstalled programs, like the browser, writing tools, and some useful apps

That is basically the only difference between distros. You can even get different spins of a distro. If you like fedora, get it with the KDE desktro envioment. It's all the same basically.

So put something on a usb drive and boot from that, try it out for a few minutes and than look at others. There are also websites that allow you to boot into different distros.

If you like something, just install it, maybe as a Dualboot first next to windows (best is on a different drive) and just try it out. If you don't like it, just jump to another one.

Linux can be a little bit pain sometimes, but in my opinion it's worth to invest the time. Have fun!