Kubuntu is the best. It’s Ubuntu with KDE tools and programs. You have Plasma as a desktop environment, which is very close to Window but that you can customize to your need.
Ubuntu is very popular so you get pretty much everything available and with tutorial, ressources and everything. KDE really push it to the most user friendly, GUI for everything kind of state.
Steam is easy to install, take charge of Proton or anything needed for your games to run.
I was very frustrated by Gnome (the default desktop environment for Ubuntu), failing miserably to make it more like Window. I guess Gnome is more for Mac users.
The only thing I recommend is deactivating Snap and installing Flatpack. It’s easy to find tuto on how to do that. Both Snap and Flatpack are doing the same idea, to bundle a program and it’s dependencies in a format that allows easier distribution to many distro. But Snap is not as good as Flatpack. You are free to leave it or to use both.
Either way, you can also install program made for Ubuntu or Debian. And with KDE come Discover that is like an App Store and updater.
Linux Mint is also good but I really think Plasma is the best desktop environment. Good thing to know you can always install more desktop environment then the one already installed, so don’t hesitate to try other.
If you are already engaged in a very pro open source stance, you might look at Fedora.
Anyway you choose, there are community of people passionate with Linux that can help you every step of the way. LLM can also help you get the basic. Good luck and welcome 🤗











No “breaking” in my experience. I had a weird thing with sound in the beginning that I tried to fix and failed but fixed itself after an update (at this point I believe it is a rite of passage for Linux 😂) and a weird bug with Nvidia on resume from sleep that was a bitch to figure out but really easy to fix. Since then no issues at all. 25.10 is smooth sailing, the update was easy and problem free. I hope I’m not cursing myself.
Now that I feel a little bit more experience with Linux in contemplating moving to Fedora KDE.
I fear one thing, it’s that my GPU’s driver is technically not maintained by Nvidia (GTX 1070). I heard Arch user suffered from that and it will eventually come for Ubuntu. Don’t know what to do for now, but I’m sure there will be solution.