Silent John

Linux mint de

You’re going to distro hop (we all do) so just start somewhere. It’s debian based, so what you learn will be applicable to like 80% of the distros out there.

I like gnome. Plasma is nice too. Lately I’ve just been using minimal i3 window manager.

Good luck!

Linux Mint DE will be the easiest transition.

They’re all basically the same dude. They’re all GNU/Linux. You have 2 main distros: Debian and Arch. Fedora is a kind of inbetween, there’s SUSE as well, but mostly it’s all Debian and Arch.

Mint, Ubuntu, etc … it’s all just Debian. Use Debian.You can use KDE plasma or Gnome or i3 or whatever you want.

Stable yea. My PC is a bit older (7 years) and I’ve never had any issues with hardware, even with my nvidia card.

Basically every distro is based on either arch or debian (some exceptions). I’ve been perfectly happy with debian, even as a gamer.