Debian is one of my favorites and one of the easiest to use if you are new. i haven't tried mint but they are very similar.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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FedoraKDE, or Mint.
Either way you'll probably be able to search and find answers to your problems (and answers for ubuntu may work), and with mint you know your friend can possibly help if need be, and they work well.
Mint, Fedora
Run KDE if you consistently game, otherwise Gnome is good since you can leave every setting after setup with it
What advantage does KDE have over Mint for gaming?
Oh, it's not kde, it's gnome
Gnome compositor can have issues with some games, most notable for me was TF2 and TF2 Classic
Don't want to think about your OS? Install Aurora. The hardest decision will be choosing your password. Install instructions are identical to any other Fedora installation. Auto updates to everything, never breaking system with bleeding edge software all the time. Superb documentation, zero maintenance, windows like desktop experience but better. That's all.
This is quite a rabbit hole you are getting yourself into, but to keep it short and relatively simple, you need to figure out something very important beforehand:
- Do you want a rolling release or a stable distro?
I'm assuming that, you are not yet familiar with these terms, so let's go with the stable distros.
You have a lot of options here, most of them will all be based of Ubuntu, which is based in Debian, so let me drop a few generally good suggestions in no particular order:
- Linux Mint
- MX Linux
- ZorinOS
- PopOS
- Fedora, (This one is not a stable distro, but you should be good with it)
Either of these is a good starting point. If down the road you feel like they stop fitting your needs, start exploring the big three, (Debian, Fedora and Arch Linux).
Fedora Silverblue. The family of Fedora Atomic desktops which Silverblue is one of brings almost unbreakable user oriented systems. Fedora Silverblue provides highly customizable via extensions Gnome Desktop experience, stability of an immutable OS, and a wide range of apps installable using Flatpak from Flathub.
Ubuntu. There are mixes of it but out of the box Ubuntu is about as straightforward a dist to install as possible and it is well supported.
That said "new laptop" and Linux are not always a match made in heaven. You might try it from a boot stick and confirm that things like the GPU, touch screen, touchpad, fingerprint reader, USB C / Lightning all work properly.
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Been meaning to try CachyOS. It's a gamer friendly Arch based distro. Might be worth looking at. Distro doesn't really matter much at all. Desktop environment does. If you want HDR support KDE and GNOME are your only bet.
Edit: Kubuntu would probably be the easiest to use and setup distro that has HDR support.