Linux

Mint is a good transition from windows

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

PopOS did it for me

@Mojtaba you can try Manjaro, is a nice distro

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.

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.