Want switch to linux

Based on your last paragraph, you might fall in the supernoob catergory. You'll want an immutable distribution, you can't break those Unless you tell it to let you break it.

As a windows user, you'll find familiarity in Fedora Kionite.

If you prefer a touchscreen oriented experience consider Fedora Silverblue.

There's a few other options on the page I'm linking, I haven't tried and therefore can't recommend either of the others.

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/

Edit: my formatting was 🗑️

Edit 2, electric boogaloo:

OP in your post you state you want Wallpaper Engine to work, unfortunately, you'll have issues there. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish with wallpaper engine you may be able to do the same using KDE Plasma. I personally use a VLC command line call to enable animated wallpapers on my rig, there's not exactly a standard for it on Linux so many of the solutions you find will be clunky. Just remember if you go around messing with your xorg.conf file you need to have a backup of it so you can undo changes easily in a terminal.

You're welcome to DM me if you need assistance.

For a more gaming-ready experience, Bazzite might suit you:
https://bazzite.gg/
- People seem to love bazzite, is it all its cracked up to be?
  I'm happy with my lmde htpc/server/gamingrig/clusterfuck so I'm not planning on changing, but I've been in the market for a handheld gaming PC and its been on my list to try.
I think immutable is great for everyone, I struggle to find a point against it but maybe I'm a supernoob too hahaha (I use NixOS, btw)
I was under the impression that the fedora atomic distros are hard to dual boot on a single drive.
- Historically yes, but this appears to not exactly be the case any longer.
  Reference https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/284
  There does appear to be a way to do it, from a cursory glance at the above it seems that Fedora and Windows need to have separate EFI partitions, I'm not all that invested though (I don't use these distros nor do I dual boot) so I don't really care to look much deeper.
- Yeah, those people who use and recommend it are just in the pocket of Big Fedora!
- Or maybe they're just genuinely a fan?
- Buddy I've got my pronouns in my username please don't misgender me.
  Additionally, your response is needlessly hostile. You've offered no additional information and have chosen my comment to be a naysayer on presumably only because it is the top comment on the post. You've contributed nothing but vitriol to this thread.
  I couldn't give two shits what distros people use, and I'm not a fucking shill. OP wanted a suggestion, I gave 4. I used tobhse Fedora because it's easy, with a large community, and with the bleeding edge release cycle the newest libraries became available more easily without enabling testing repositories or using sketchy PPAs that haven't been vetted.
  If OP weren't noob, and weren't someone who has already broken a mint install three times I'd have recommended that use something Debian based or Arch based, but they are, so I didn't.

Relevant post I made:

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.

Thank you i will search about bazzite and see what i can do
- If you don't like the gaming stuff try aurora, feel free to message me on matrix.
Thank you for that info, I tried to use mint on a laptop with a touchscreen but the touchscreen didn’t work, so I will try your recommendation.

If your computer can't handle Linux Mint, then either you do something wrong, or your computer is really unstable. I won't ask you to use Mint, but I will say, that I use it on three different computers, and not a single problem anywhere. Dual-boot is notoriously unstable - mostly due to MS... So my advice is, to use a computer for Linux by it self...

I suggest you to check out Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. I have been using it for years without any problems. I also have dual boot with Windows, but I think I will delete Windows soon and use only Linux.

My name is none of your business, and I approve this suggestion.
For most of us using Linux distros for years, we already have a preferred distro that is highly unlikely to be Ubuntu or even Debian based, but for first-timers, I honestly believe Mint is the way to go. But seeing how mint has been a flop for you (as another poster said, it'd be great to know what went wrong) an immutable distro (like Bazzite) would fit your current needs better, but these distros are not the best way to start learning about Linux and eventually migrate from Windows entirely.

EndeavourOS is the best imo because it's basically arch with a minimal skin on it to aide in installation etc

I've been using it for the better part of 5 years now with no issues. I play games, self host, work etc It's great.

If you install paru you get access to the AUR which has everything under the sun ready to install.

Linux Mint Debian Edition.

You say not to suggest mint, but you most probably used an Ubuntu based Mint so that doesn't count.

Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.

Honestly, Linux Mint is probably the best option. Failing that, Fedora is another good option which is derived from Red Hat, it does things differently to Debian based systems like Mint and Ubuntu, but it's widely supported.

You'll need to iterate what you were doing when it stopped working, 99% of the time, it's down to human error. As someone once said:

"Unix [or Linux] will give you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. If you didn't think rope would do that, you should have read the man page."

Ill die on this hill but give pop_os! A try, last time i tried it it was really polished.

Pop's the distro that made me go full linux. It let me tinker and have the linux experience without a lot of setup or preexisting knowledge.

What sort of "simple" things did you have trouble with in Mint?

You could try popOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu. But without knowing what you struggled with, Mint should still be the best choice of you're new. Your troubles could just be the desktop environment you picked, or enabling third party/proprietary repositories. Or they could be a legit issue that is easily fixed using a different distro.

Well i did it beffore one month so i dont remember wheat happened clearly but i remmber the first problem i have was the net then the sound then steam games and porton that problem when i tried to fix rust not working i Accidently broke the system the second time i was careful with everyting i did everyting right then after one day of using i start to have black screens lag crashes and sometimes the games dosent open and sometimes when i play the game just close and dont open i am not talking about just rust i tried another games. I left the games alone i tried to just update something i don't remmber what was anyway from the update manger then screen just off i didn't know what happened i just re install it again and this time i did everyting right but i wasnt happy with the appearance so i did a lot of things make the system cool but when i start in the wallpaper yp you know i destroy the system while trying to make wallpaper engine work so i just left mint i was having a lot of problems but that was when the system died and what i remember of it
- Looks to me like Nobara might be what you want, it's fedora based and is tailored toward gaming. I haven't used it myself, so I can't comment on how it's different from fedora, but Fedora itself is pretty darn solid

https://fedoraproject.org/kde/

I dunno, I started with Debian and then many months later learned that it was one of the harder distributions given the outdated packages.

Glad I chose Debian because Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, PureOS, etc are all derivatives of it.

Mint is always recommended because it just works, it looks windows-like, it's legit fine no it doesn't look dated or ugly. Cinammon is hot.
Thing is. Mint is for the most part a just works distro. Based on Ubuntu it is very easy to find help for it. Combine that with a load of sane defaults like disabling snaps. The default UI and theme could defiantly use a facelift
I personally don't see much value of Mint or Ubuntu over Debian.
They all suffer from the same issue: lack of a user repository. This means any layman is going to immediately be turned off by the distro and the whole Linux experience as soon as they want to install something that isn't in their distro's repository.
Neither derivative distro can be considered 'easier' because of this. Might as well just go with Debian and cut out the middlemen.
I have spent so much time professionally in Windows over the years that when I decided to switch it had to look nothing like it. So Mint is out. Kde as a whole really. Vanilla gnome looks kinda sterile to me. So I ended up with Pop!_OS and have been happy so far.
Probably because it's easy to get used to.
As for the looks, I'd say it looks better than Mac, Ubuntu looks best, but that's so subjective and fairly easy to change anyway.
Thank you! When switching it has to work better and look better. Mint does not look better. Zorin is very simple, includes Wine and has Zorin Connect.
I think my first distro was Ubuntu ( but that was because everyone around me was using it only) before I finally migrated to Debian less than a year later. Mint and Ubuntu both use Debian as their base. (Mint technically uses Ubuntu as it's base but has a Debian edition as well for backup reasons).
I know Debian's problem is it's software repos(Debian Stable can be filled with older versions of software). But it can't be denied that it is rock solid (for most part), has a comparatively decent set of software in its repos and a large set of distros use it as their base.
It feels dated and ugly
Weird, mine came with Cinnamon, not Plasma
My only gripe is the default cursor. I hate it

I suggest BazziteOS. I have it installed on 2 of my computers for about a year and it works great. It runs KDE and it looks similar to Windows but is much better. Also, I believe it has support for Wallpaper Engine, though I haven't tried it.

It is Fedora based and Fedora also has a sizeable community for any questions and tutorials you may have.

The reason why I recommend Bazziteos is because it comes out of the box ready for gaming, you would have steam, wine, lutris, etc installed almost instantly and ready to play.

I just finished downloading bazzite and now creating a backup on flash for both bazzite and windows using ventoy because i know myself i will do something stupid to make me re install systems
- Chances are that, if you do break something, it'll be on the Windows side.
  Bazzite is very solid for new users as it's very convoluted to access and modify anything system related.
  Having said that, if you have any intention to learn how to use Linux distros, and eventually remove Microsoft from your life, immutable distros like Bazzite will limit you dramatically, so I suggest you start with a regular "mutable" distro. Now, if your intention is just to have something that works, scape Windows every now and then, and come back to Windows, it's hard to beat an immutable distro.

My advice: Stick to distros and softwares that are widely used. When presented with options, tend to stick to the defaults.

Just because literally 100% is customizable in the Linux world does not mean you have to customize your system 100%.

That's my motto since 1996 when I started using Linux.

Any major distro will work, it's the Desktop Environment that you'll want to examine. Whether GNOME, KDE, Xfce, etc. the DE is what you'll mostly deal with when computing. Try distrowatch.com for a good overview of various flavors. I, personally, have always started newbies off with PCLOS with KDE, as Tex tends to avoid the bleeding edge in favor of stability.

Something listed in the top 10 or so on https://distrowatch.com/. Personally I like one of the Debian based distros.

Currently we use Ubuntu and Debian. Ubuntu would be the better of the two for beginners.

The distrowatch beginners list is: https://distrowatch.com/search-mobile.php?category=Beginners#simple

Why would Ubuntu be better for beginners?
- Because Canonical put a lot of effort into usability. Pretty much all of the popular recommended beginner distributions are Ubuntu based. Examples: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, Elementary.
  People will recommend other stuff, often that are loved by varioius enthusiasts but these may or may not be that suitable for beginners. Call me skeptical.
  I use and recommend Ubuntu because it is easy to install, use, and just works. It is also widely supported and very popular. The one thing I do not like about it is the Snap focus. I would love to recommend Linux Mint but last time I used it major distribution upgrades from the GUI were not supported. Have no idea if they fixed that. Ubuntu upgrades are the click of a button. In my family there are nontechnical users and they have used it for almost 20 years just fine without much help from me.
  On the other hand I use Debian if I intend to custom configure something and want a minimal install to start from. Major upgrades on Debian are not a click of a button. On the other hand Debian is not Snap based. My workstation and VPS are Debian for example.

Keep to popular distros. I'd personally recommend Pop os or fedora. Opensuse is up there too just never clicked with me when I was a new users.

I actually have started to discourage people using Ubuntu because of forced snap packages and multiple software store GUIs. It has led to a lot more confusion for new users even though Ubuntu is supposed to be user friendly.

Agreed. It was good for that for a long while, but there are much better options for newbies nowadays.
- Exactly

If you're new then fedora is great

It's worth noting that fedora is heavily sponsored by RedHat (a subsidiary of IBM) and is the upstream testing ground for RHEL (Redhats commercial offering). RedHat also has close ties to Israels government and it's military.
This is a huge dealbreaker for someone like me so I feel it's necessary to mention.
- Not to get into politics but the whole point of Linux is about being open and used by anyone from anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to see various parts of the Linux kernel, drivers, etc developed/funded by people from Israel, Russia, and many many other countries.
  Edit: the point of this message, this type of approach to your OS choice will ultimately result in throwing your PC in the trash if you dig deep enough.

I have to give it that the Fedora distros are a slightly bit superior to Ubuntu variants but for those that value some degree of not favoring corporate US (IBM/Red Hat) that provides AI resources for Israel's military to do what it is doing... Myself I tried to like Mint, I really did... but could not... not just it is old-fashioned looking but has limitations with scaling and others.

Now, I do recognize for the initiators is it great! Now, for those that find Mint ugly I recommend TuxedoOS... I find it as good as Kubuntu but without its known limitations with flatpaks. Yes, TuxedoOS was created for Tuxedo laptops but they left it open to use it with others so no problems at all and very well maintained. Now, you may want remove the Tuxedo app that they installed just to free some resources... a 10-seconds thing to do. Drawback is servers in Germany so a bit slower updates than usual for most.

I'm not sure that you can get wallpaper engine running. Maybe someone else can say otherwise, but I wouldn't trust second hand.

There is a project that can run some backgrounds, but is very experimental and IMHO not suited for running constantly as a desktop background. WPE is way too deep in specific windows features to be able to run on linux smoothly.
A nice alternative for Linux on Wayland might be swww: https://github.com/LGFae/swww

99% of the time a dual boot doesn't work its because of Windows. There should be no real reason that Mint fails anything simple as long as its compatible with your system. I've seen others report that Windows will occasionally destroy a dual boot when updating.

Mint is a good transition from windows

Tried it and hate it
- What did you hate from it?
- Maybe try Tuxedo?
- Yeah, honestly I don't get all the love for mint whenever this question comes up. Bazzite's a good choice, I'm running Bluefin it's sister (same thing but not geared toward gamers) and it's been great from a set it and forget it perspective. One caution is that they don't always play nice with dual booting, so make sure you do your due diligence backing up what's important to you.

If you're a complete newbie, go Ubuntu. Yes, it's boring but the community is huge. You can find a lot of answers about problems on reddit/ stack over flow...etc. Literally any Linux problem you have, a Google search of that will show many answers from Ubuntu community.

Try Fedora it was my first real distro. I still use it on my laptop. Everything is easy about it.

So... do it?

Now to the question which distro, honestly it does not matter YET!

You probably don't even know what a distro is (no offense) but what you did highlight clearly are the needs, namely :

playing games
popular
not Mint because somehow it breaks (would be VERY important to understand why though)

... so that actually narrows things down quite a bit.

The most popular distribution are the easiet to find (I'm on Debian and SteamOS so I use Arch BTW) and that's a safe choice indeed. Playing games does not narrow things down much as most distro, if not all, do not prevent against playing game and IMHO the optimization specific to gaming are pretty much pointless in most cases.

Your edit point that you are trying a distribution already so yes, please, do go for it. I do suggest though that WHEN things go wrong, like it did with Mint, you take the time to understand WHY. This in itself will help you to either switch to another distribution and arguably more importantly what even is a distribution and finally which one of the remaining ones (if you do actually switch rather than fix) are more appropriate for you.

Finally my last recommendation is to back up your data. That's what IMHO make the difference between having fun distro hopping versus pulling hair out stressing that your last game save, or work notebooks, will not be deleted.

Have fun learning!

Your last point i learn it in the hard why and for the post i just wanted to see people suggests because everyone i asked near me says linux mint and i really hate it because what happened with me i already said what happened in the comments so i won't again

Linux Distro made to accommodate Windows Users by being as similar as is reasonable in UI and organization: AnduinOS.

If you try it, use 1.3, as you are not an enterprise use case.

@Mojtaba you can try Manjaro, is a nice distro

PopOS did it for me

I recently switched to PopOS and have been enjoying the switch immensely. Just works out of the box.

Honestly I suggest learning in avm first so you can do save states. I recommend doing stunting like nix or a declarative/ composable distro. Learn the new way so that your getting the tools and things that are actually being used.

Don't get me wrong it's not an easy learning curve but I think it's the better method of learning.

OP specifically declines to use Linux mint, per their final point in their post. As a 2 decade user who is currently using Mint, OP is right. The windows experience is so handholdey that new users often aren't familiar with even HOW to research to fix their problems. Mint, a distribution that gives you training wheels but will not hold your hand is not ideal for someone who has already broken it several times, doing activities they didn't feel were necessary to share.
OP needs an immutable distro.
I’ve been thinking about making the switch. How difficult do you find it to play steam games on your setup?
- I switched to Linux Mint like a month ago and Inhad no problems at all. Valve pushes Linux a lot since the Steamdeck. Had not a single problem with a game. I even played Itch.io games. Just set the compatability options to proton and most stuff will run fine. Online Multiplayer games do make problems though. They have kernel based anti cheat and that is not supported. If you are unsure check this website for the games you play: https://www.protondb.com/
- LMDE (mint sans ubuntu) user here, gaming is a dream, but sometimes a nightmare. You may need eventually to manually update the graphics card driver If you're on Nvidia, as the debian repos it pulls from are hella out of date. Otherwise, smooth sailing.
  You'll likely only encounter problems on native games, Feral ports specifically seem to assume people have a libraries that they don't, so I often find myself launching their games in a terminal a million times to figure out what libraries are missing and manually link them or just copy them into the game lib folder.
- For me was difficult i tried to run rust using proton and tried to run some games on it like the witcher 3 beatblock and inscryption some games work and the others no i fix it and make all of them run but still after playing sometime i have crushes and black screen and even just the game desied to close and not work i wasnt care that much on gaming on linux but sometimes i just wanted to open the game for a minutes but nope

Bazzite is great because is rpm-ostree based. But you need to understand a little bit the concept of atomic distro. For gaming, I think it comes packed with most of the required things so imo, try Bazzite. Also, linux mint it's very easy to use, fi you do something simple and you need to reinstall the distro, maybe something was done wrong from the beginning.

I've learned so much Linux on Nobara and i feel like it's not mentioned much, not it's got an active discord and gets regular updates

I used Ubuntu for a long time. It is convenient because it is very popular and there is a lot of software available for installation without any extra steps. However, I think it has become quite overloaded. I have been using Fedora with KDE for a relatively long time and I am very satisfied. I use it as my main home and work operating system. It has proven to be very stable. I am engaged in software development, so I use it very actively, and I am happy with it. it meets all my needs. I think You could consider Fedora.

I just installed Nobara in a similar setup for similar reasons a few days ago after having several bad experiences with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint. I wanted to move away from Ubuntu-based distros and Nobara seems like it's focused on gaming (frequent updates, etc). It's been.. I dunno if great is the right word, but pretty good. I run into difficulties of some variety with almost everything I do (can't install battle.net in lutris because it hangs at 45%, lutris can't log into epic games store, etc), but I've also found solutions for them without too much trouble and the games that I have managed to install run great.

Yeh I don't think Nobara is beginner friendly. I'd say my experience was the same as yours. Difficulties with lots of things, but could find solutions. Given it wasn't my primary PC, and I don't have time for that - gone for mint (needed some stale stale kernl)
- To be fair that was also my experience with PopOS which is designed to be user-friendly. The answer to questions like 'how do I take a screenshot of a region and copy it to clipboard without spamming files' or 'how do I switch audio devices between speakers and headset' just tends to be 'run this long-ass command you would never have figured out on your own' or 'Write a shell script full of such commands to do it for you and call it with a shortcut key'. I think this is a linux problem, not a distro problem, because it was the same way when I was using redhat 15 years ago or slackware 30 years ago.

https://getaurora.dev/en

It’s 2025, if you’ve got the space to dual boot, you’ve got space for snapshots. There’s no reason not to set them up. Btrfs, ZFS, LVM, pick your poison. Disk is cheap, your time isn't.

And if “simple stuff” is breaking your system, that tells me three things:

You’re still using apt-get instead of apt
You’re ignoring dependency warnings
You’re probably not fully understanding the commands you’re running — so RTFM

So yeah, I will be telling you to use Mint, with at LEAST daily snapshots.

Well no i really use everyting on the newest version and i check two times on everyting i put or press even when downloading anything simple like discord or browser i search first then do but it just somewho goes off and now i spent more than 15 hours on bazzite to just download it. i am learning first then act after doing everyting things right and checking i said to myself this time i won't mess with the termnal for 2 days to not make my system broke and guess what after downloading steam and brave and wallpaper engine and dis i was looking at my downloaded wallpapers changing them then the screen goes black and the desktop dosent response i can search inside the system and open taps but the desktop broke and now i am looking for soultion i didn't even put a single command or play with the system i was just changing my wallpapers and that also happened in mint not the wallpaper issue but with other simple things like download one app form the software manger
- Sounds more like a hardware issue. Screen black, like it goes off no output? Any visual glitching first? Desktop doesn't respond? How do you know, is it sounds stop or make funny noise?
  Search inside the system? Open taps? Not sure what this means
  Can you restart the computer? Or will the distro not boot after this?
  And this doesn't happen in Windows?
- Okay, assuming you’re being honest, it sounds like a hardware issue. Either your RAM is corrupting, or your hard drive is prone to errors. The good news is that you have options to daily drive Linux without ending up in a situation where you have to reinstall everything from scratch.
  Like I mentioned earlier, you absolutely need to be making snapshots. I'm currently running Manjiro, and I've completely borked my system like 10 times already. But when I set up my system, I made sure my main partition was BTRFS, which has allowed me to roll back easily through both the UI and in grub rescue mode.
  I would also recommend that if you are going to continue to dual boot windows, make sure they're on two separate physical drives. And don't share stuff like your steam library, because windows likes to screw shit up, and steam will throw a fit if you make it read an NTFS drive on Linux.
  Just don't give up, keep posting questions, and maybe even come back and post stuff like specific crash reports and system info so we can help you better. :)

I’m a big fan of Elementary OS, it’s likely the most user friendly desktop, easy to use and plenty of advanced features, such as thoughtful options to make the interface usable by everyone.

I used Mint on my previous system but currently rolling CachyOS personally. Bazzite was a close contender for me.

Fedora or UwUntu.

Fedora KDE would be my suggestion
Fuck Red Hat and their closed source bullshit
- While I agree with the sentiment, fedora is fairly independent to their RHEL in terms of operations right?
- I agree. I don't trust any of the shilling surrounding their distros.

Try Void Linux. It's awesome.

Should be popular distro so if i have a problem i can ask about it

I mean, Arch has the Arch Wiki which is very good. (I use Arch, btw.) 😸

I'm surprised Mint is giving you trouble. Where you doing something... risky? Or maybe the hardware you're running isn't very compatible?

Otherwise, a distro like VanillaOS (or any immutable distro) might be able to keep your system more stable.

Well it's my fault a little but mint was so much sucks in my own hobbies and give a lot of crashes and lag i was so angry in the last time i tried it i wanted to type sudo kill system but i didn't i just remove it from windows

ZorinOS maybe ?

Bazzite is great for gaming !

Nobara too.

theres a new one made by a microsoft enginer as a hobby project called Anduin OS it is very simmilar to windows based on ubuntu it can be downloaded at https://www.anduinos.com/ and a video by mental outlaw can be found at https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=bQAUFgS657w i personally never tried it and it is a hobby project but it looks promising

MX Linux

If you get to the point where you decide you want a distro that is not immutable, try Garuda, it's where I went after Bazzite. It is also gaming focused and has a great helper app to install most of the things most people need and do updates.

The age old question. You have to understand that Linux the kernel is made in such a way that anything built on top of it will always require way too much from the user. It feels like something made from programmers for programmers, just like how UNIX was designed. No distro will be able to change that. Windows is packed with bandaids to make it behave closer to what users expect, but anything that comes from UNIX has it's focus in making the code nice, not making ordinary users happy necessarily.

So picking a distro is entirely a choice on how you wanna interact with the kernel's interfaces, but they're still the same interfaces. No pretty UI will change that.

Just make sure that the distro you choose has a mature community behind it and that packages are being actively maintained. Make sure that if you file a bug report it will get some attention. That's the only thing you should care about in a distro, everything else is flashy nonsense.

Edit: Also as you can see by the replies to my comment, Linux is kind of a cult, so beware of that.

Android runs an only slightly modified Linux kernel, and yet the OS requires much less from the user than e.g. Windows or MacOS.
Chromebooks run a bog-standard Linux kernel and the target audience is kids.
My car's entertainment system runs a standard Linux kernel, and the UX is so cut down that PC expertise really doesn't matter when using it.
MacOS and iOS, two systems known for their ease of use, both stem from BSD, which comes from Unix.
The kernel has nothing to do with this.
In fact, the only mainstream kernel used in user-facing operating systems that doesn't "come from Unix" is Windows. Everything else is derived either from Linux or BSD, which both are derived from Unix.
There isn't even a mainstream phone OS anymore that doesn't "come from Unix".
- If you don't root your Android, you can barely do anything. The UI on Android hides all of the ugliness of the implementation and that shows up as jarring bugs, which you can do nothing about as an ordinary user. If you use the manufacturer's stock OS it's always a horrible experience as well. They also use kernels which are very far from upstream and have a ton of custom proprietary patches. That's exactly my point regarding flashy nonsense. And that's exactly what Windows does as well.
  Chromebooks rely on containers and web apps, but once you need to configure your OS, good luck.
  MacOS and iOS rely on the company's complete control of their hardware, OS and apps. They have the most closed system out there and rely on things not changing too much. They also expect users to pay for every little inconvenience.
  I've been using Linux for plenty of years now, I'm a fan, I love the model, I love the way it's developed, but I also recognize the issues it has. I love programming and going deep in the system, but that's not what ordinary users necessarily want. That's just the reality, the kernel is not setup and documented in a way that would allow easy comprehension and configuration. If you don't have that, then what can a user do when they have to configure the OS and you always need to do that for one reason or another. Companies like Canonical tried to market a model of keeping the system stable and comprehandable, but it never worked out in practice.
This person has no idea what he's talking about and his input can be safely disregarded.
- Wow such an informative comment, great argument. <3

Suggesting NixOS to a completely new user is stupid. NixOS is cool but very different from almost all Linux distros. Comes with its own language you have to learn as well.

Just note that is you really need a safe place, having Windows installed on the same machine is counter productive. Make sure you encrypt your Linux partitions. Otherwise it's very easy to mount them and sniff all the things from Windows.

No. Windows does not support ext filesystems without a third party driver.
- cute
I don't think that's right because windows cannot even read linux files and if i just separate the partitions i am safe form windows stalking

Try Manjaro. It will be the easiest to set up and find software that hasn't been deliberately packaged for your setup.

Clearly this comment is unpopular but it sure would be handy if anyone took the time to say why
- (I used to be a Manjaro user)
  Let's say Manjaro has a bad history and a lot of people don't take them seriously anymore and trust them even less.
  At the very least it is quite a messy distro to use.