I know this is super late - turns out i was wrong, its x11

This misses the players who are always low elo for their whole lives - its not fun for them to get stomped every game forever…

Great list actually. I use (and have paid for) grayjay which so far is great as a way to aggregate some of these. I’d also suggest Patreon, despite not being perfect in itself it has a lot of youtube creators on it so you dont have to give up certain creators

Seems like you’ve got a lot of distro recommendations haha which is good - go for one of those and you should be ok (I’m on mint for the record). My suggestion if you have a bit if extra money and less time is to buy a prebuilt system with linux already installed, tuxedo and system76 are two big names but I can’t comment on what to go with there.

However the advantage with buying an integrated system like that is that the hardware is all guaranteed and you can ring them for support if needed.

My other suggestion is to BACKUP your files!

Yep I’m pretty sure its wayland! But its only version 5.X

I did install Plasma + apps on mint btw (just apt installed and crossed my fingers)! Have been running issue free for about 6 months but I didnt uninstall the gnome apps so theres a duplicate for everything.

Edit: I still wouldn’t reccomend it if you are starting out, I only did it because I couldnt be bothered switching distros

I LOVE this comments section with so many correct, yet opposite views.

For reference I am on Mint where I installed KDE.

1. My impression is that the distro does matter (a bit) but that lots of distros are very similar. The front runners you have listed all seem quite appropriate for your use case, but Fedora unlike the others updates more frequently and therefore is slanted towards more features.

The other ones are all based on Ubuntu and will offer a similar experience IF you took the time to switch out all the desktop environment, apps, settings tweaks, etc. However, the fact is that you probably won’t do that, and unless there is a good reason to, why would you when you could install a kde/gnome distro anyway?

2. I wouldn’t worry about the ones you have listed at least, not comparable to Microsoft and at the end of the day it is still linux so it will be way way way easier to switch again if the companies try anything shifty. Ubuntu has made some controversial decisions around snaps but it seriously is on a different level to M$.

3. All mature afaik. Mint and Fedora are both extremely popular.

4. Multiple monitors has been fine for me. Not sure about HDR but look up and understand wayland vs X11.

5. Plasma KDE is good! I would recommend Plasma or Gnome over Cinnamon if you know you want to tinker.