To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I’ve used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I’d say it’s essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I’m an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
If you want to get started with Linux, I’d recommended Mint. It’s very easy to install and will run on just about anything. The Cinnamon desktop is pretty similar to Windows and you’ll feel right at home. Install Steam and start playing your games, it’s that simple. There are of course plenty of other excellent options but for ease of getting started, I don’t think anything beats Mint.
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
there is not one thing that is easier about the setup process on mint and since bazzite offers a nvidia image it’s actually easier.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Well i haven’t tried Bazzite, but you’re selling it really well. I agree that Mint is a bit behind in Wayland support and they should get on with it. On the other hand, none if those things are really very relevant for day to day use. As long as you stick to the software center and update manager in Mint, you won’t have any trouble installing software or applying updates.
sure, day to day it might not matter if you don’t do anything weird, but when it does matter… it matters a lot
and you’re not gaining anything by sacrificing these additions.