As other's have suggested, PopOS is pretty good. I would also consider Nobara as well. It's based on Fedora with plenty of tweaks that makes it much better for gaming. It also has the ability to quickly install NVIDIA drivers. after the first login.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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I suppose PopOS is the best call for him
Thanks for the suggestion. Is it possible to avoid the console on PopOS? Can you setup everything by UI?
Yes. With PopOs you can do pretty much everything by UI
System76 is a laptop manufacturer that uses its own system, called PopOS. So they're aiming to be totally user friendly with the distro
For gaming, yes. 100% GUI. Not even codecs or the like.
Walk him through the GNOME paradigm, it could be a let down or a game changer it depends on their needs.
Pop os is great for gaming and it comes with nvidia drivers installed
Personally I would recommend Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu so any issues should be easy to find and fix online. It's very similar in terms of the actual desktop to Windows instead of being completely different like Pop!OS. You should also be able to completely avoid the command line as well though I do encourage you to have your friend learn at least some of the basics so he at least knows how to use it.
I've used Mint Cinnamon as recently as a few months ago for a machine with a 3060Ti. The experience was great. Pop!_OS also touts native NVIDIA support, as others have mentioned, but I have less experience with it.
Seconding mint. Been using it on my gaming PCs since 2015 or so, including my brand new one.
Pop!_OS seems like it would suit this use case. Especially since I hear that a recent update to the pop shop has made it much more responsive. Also it has nvidia drivers pre-installed and you can update the nvidia drivers through the pop shop. Literally everything can be done through with a GUI
I'm not really in the know myself, but I've recently seen EndeavourOS recommend over PopOS due to faster driver updates.
You can install pamac for a GUI for the package manager. Do yay to search for any package and install it; do yay (nothing else) to upgrade everything, and yay -Rcns to remove stuff and all their unused dependencies. I also recommend chaoticAUR
For the DE I recommend MATE but you can select any of the major ones in the installer
Get synapse for a spotlight-like search; it uses the alt+space keybind by default
The arch wiki is amazing
I use Garuda and it is great. Lots of DEs to choose from and it's super easy. It is rolling release mind you, but the most beginner friendly one there is. It's also gaming focused and it got a lot of different additional little applications specifically so you don't have to use the terminal. My favorite distro for gaming and also my favorite distro period. I am using it for 1-2 months now for work and gaming :)
Other than that Mint is a great choice too.
I am in love with my GARUDA <3
Arch Linux or EndeavourOS has been really good for me. Make sure to get ProtonUp-qt to get and manage bleeding edge versions of Proton
I was looking for a distro too and I got recommended Pop OS a lot so you might ask your friend to give that a try.
I've been using Opensuse Tumbleweed. Cs2 is running great on it
My SO enjoys Zorin. Based on Ubuntu (like pop os) but had built in themes that makes the desktop environment easily customizable.
They found it easy to use and set up.
Zorin right now is based on Ubuntu 20.04 and GNOME 3.36, which are pretty much dated. If his friend has a gaming rig, it would be better to look for a more up to date distro
I was more going for ease of use. If you are playing the latest and greatest then I agree you’d probably want Arch based or at the minimum Fedora based distributions. However if you are playing some more stable games, or I do titles and Ubuntu is fine. The updates will come.