Switching to Linux, looking for distro recommendations

IsildursBane
2024-10-17T20:47:59Z

Overview

When I swapped the motherboard on my computer, I lost my Windows license and Microsoft support was useless. So I am switching my desktop over to Linux. I am planning on setting up dual boot, so that I still have Windows 10 with the watermark for certain use cases, but hoping I can run primarily Linux.

Previous Linux Experience

I have swapped an old laptop to Linux (elementaryOS) before and was able to have it do the simple tasks I required of that computer. I also have an old desktop running proxmox, with various VMs, primarily a NAS running openmediavault. Also, I took a college class on Linux system admin, which focused on various tasks on ubuntu. So overall, I am pretty familiar with Debian-based Linux and doing stuff in the terminal, but I would prefer to not have to use the terminal often.

Workload

So I use my computer for fairly normal use cases that should not be too problematic for Linux. Things I plan to do are:

Non-competitive gaming (Minecraft, Civilization V and VI, occassionally single player FPS games)

Video editing via DaVinci Resolve

General web browsing

Libre Office is what I plan to switch to from MS Office

Plans for testing

I am going to setup a VM on my hypervisor to try out the basic interface of each distro, and try basic tasks. Testing will probably not involve running the heavier applications such as DaVinci Resolve or games. However, I will look into the install process of some of these. For games, I am just going to rely on the work Steam has done for Linux gaming recently.

Things I am looking for in a distro

The things I want in a distro are:

Debian based preferable, but am considering others

Simple tasks can be done graphically, instead of via terminal

Upgrade in place is preferable (I believe similar to how ubuntu now allows for upgrades to the next LTS does not require a reinstall)

Similar UI to Windows 10 is preferable

Planned distros to test

Distros I wanted to try before posting

popOS

Mint

Distros I am considering testing after being recommended them:

Arch

Fedora (I am strongly leaning towards this one, but want to do more testing)

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