Linux

Linux Mint Debian Edition.

You say not to suggest mint, but you most probably used an Ubuntu based Mint so that doesn't count.

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.

Ubuntu,Pop!_OS,Fedora,elementary OS. I would like to start with Ubuntu or Pop!_OS. These are the most popular and well-adapted distros, which are ideal for gaming, creativity and safe use. If Ubuntu is not to your liking because of Snap or telemetry, Pop!_OS can be a great alternative. But you can still download any distribution you want, you just need to look for it yourself

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

If you're new then fedora is great

Honestly, Linux Mint is probably the best option. Failing that, Fedora is another good option which is derived from Red Hat, it does things differently to Debian based systems like Mint and Ubuntu, but it's widely supported.

You'll need to iterate what you were doing when it stopped working, 99% of the time, it's down to human error. As someone once said:

"Unix [or Linux] will give you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. If you didn't think rope would do that, you should have read the man page."

99% of the time a dual boot doesn't work its because of Windows. There should be no real reason that Mint fails anything simple as long as its compatible with your system. I've seen others report that Windows will occasionally destroy a dual boot when updating.

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.

https://getaurora.dev/en

I suggest you to check out Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. I have been using it for years without any problems. I also have dual boot with Windows, but I think I will delete Windows soon and use only Linux.

PopOS did it for me

If your computer can't handle Linux Mint, then either you do something wrong, or your computer is really unstable. I won't ask you to use Mint, but I will say, that I use it on three different computers, and not a single problem anywhere. Dual-boot is notoriously unstable - mostly due to MS... So my advice is, to use a computer for Linux by it self...

Linux Mint

Any major distro will work, it's the Desktop Environment that you'll want to examine. Whether GNOME, KDE, Xfce, etc. the DE is what you'll mostly deal with when computing. Try distrowatch.com for a good overview of various flavors. I, personally, have always started newbies off with PCLOS with KDE, as Tex tends to avoid the bleeding edge in favor of stability.

Based on your last paragraph, you might fall in the supernoob catergory. You'll want an immutable distribution, you can't break those Unless you tell it to let you break it.

As a windows user, you'll find familiarity in Fedora Kionite.

If you prefer a touchscreen oriented experience consider Fedora Silverblue.

There's a few other options on the page I'm linking, I haven't tried and therefore can't recommend either of the others.

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/

Edit: my formatting was 🗑️

Edit 2, electric boogaloo:

OP in your post you state you want Wallpaper Engine to work, unfortunately, you'll have issues there. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish with wallpaper engine you may be able to do the same using KDE Plasma. I personally use a VLC command line call to enable animated wallpapers on my rig, there's not exactly a standard for it on Linux so many of the solutions you find will be clunky. Just remember if you go around messing with your xorg.conf file you need to have a backup of it so you can undo changes easily in a terminal.

You're welcome to DM me if you need assistance.

My advice: Stick to distros and softwares that are widely used. When presented with options, tend to stick to the defaults.

Just because literally 100% is customizable in the Linux world does not mean you have to customize your system 100%.

That's my motto since 1996 when I started using Linux.

@Mojtaba you can try Manjaro, is a nice distro

Relevant post I made:

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.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.

EndeavourOS is the best imo because it's basically arch with a minimal skin on it to aide in installation etc

I've been using it for the better part of 5 years now with no issues. I play games, self host, work etc It's great.

If you install paru you get access to the AUR which has everything under the sun ready to install.

Try Fedora it was my first real distro. I still use it on my laptop. Everything is easy about it.

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 dunno, I started with Debian and then many months later learned that it was one of the harder distributions given the outdated packages.

Glad I chose Debian because Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, PureOS, etc are all derivatives of it.