Ill die on this hill but give pop_os! A try, last time i tried it it was really polished.
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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I suggest BazziteOS. I have it installed on 2 of my computers for about a year and it works great. It runs KDE and it looks similar to Windows but is much better. Also, I believe it has support for Wallpaper Engine, though I haven't tried it.
It is Fedora based and Fedora also has a sizeable community for any questions and tutorials you may have.
The reason why I recommend Bazziteos is because it comes out of the box ready for gaming, you would have steam, wine, lutris, etc installed almost instantly and ready to play.
I just finished downloading bazzite and now creating a backup on flash for both bazzite and windows using ventoy because i know myself i will do something stupid to make me re install systems
Chances are that, if you do break something, it'll be on the Windows side.
Bazzite is very solid for new users as it's very convoluted to access and modify anything system related.
Having said that, if you have any intention to learn how to use Linux distros, and eventually remove Microsoft from your life, immutable distros like Bazzite will limit you dramatically, so I suggest you start with a regular "mutable" distro. Now, if your intention is just to have something that works, scape Windows every now and then, and come back to Windows, it's hard to beat an immutable distro.
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I’m always shocked by all the recommendations to use Mint. It feels dated and ugly. Admittedly, I migrated from Mac, but how abused must you Windows users be to find Mint a suitable replacement? I personally wound up with Zorin OS and recommend it. The software store makes installing apps from multiple sources tolerable. It’s also got a nice UI and you can easily change it.
I personally don't see much value of Mint or Ubuntu over Debian.
They all suffer from the same issue: lack of a user repository. This means any layman is going to immediately be turned off by the distro and the whole Linux experience as soon as they want to install something that isn't in their distro's repository.
Neither derivative distro can be considered 'easier' because of this. Might as well just go with Debian and cut out the middlemen.
Probably because it's easy to get used to.
As for the looks, I'd say it looks better than Mac, Ubuntu looks best, but that's so subjective and fairly easy to change anyway.
I have spent so much time professionally in Windows over the years that when I decided to switch it had to look nothing like it. So Mint is out. Kde as a whole really. Vanilla gnome looks kinda sterile to me. So I ended up with Pop!_OS and have been happy so far.
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I'm not sure that you can get wallpaper engine running. Maybe someone else can say otherwise, but I wouldn't trust second hand.
There is a project that can run some backgrounds, but is very experimental and IMHO not suited for running constantly as a desktop background. WPE is way too deep in specific windows features to be able to run on linux smoothly.
It’s 2025, if you’ve got the space to dual boot, you’ve got space for snapshots. There’s no reason not to set them up. Btrfs, ZFS, LVM, pick your poison. Disk is cheap, your time isn't.
And if “simple stuff” is breaking your system, that tells me three things:
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You’re still using apt-get instead of apt
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You’re ignoring dependency warnings
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You’re probably not fully understanding the commands you’re running — so RTFM
So yeah, I will be telling you to use Mint, with at LEAST daily snapshots.
Well no i really use everyting on the newest version and i check two times on everyting i put or press even when downloading anything simple like discord or browser i search first then do but it just somewho goes off and now i spent more than 15 hours on bazzite to just download it. i am learning first then act after doing everyting things right and checking i said to myself this time i won't mess with the termnal for 2 days to not make my system broke and guess what after downloading steam and brave and wallpaper engine and dis i was looking at my downloaded wallpapers changing them then the screen goes black and the desktop dosent response i can search inside the system and open taps but the desktop broke and now i am looking for soultion i didn't even put a single command or play with the system i was just changing my wallpapers and that also happened in mint not the wallpaper issue but with other simple things like download one app form the software manger
Okay, assuming you’re being honest, it sounds like a hardware issue. Either your RAM is corrupting, or your hard drive is prone to errors. The good news is that you have options to daily drive Linux without ending up in a situation where you have to reinstall everything from scratch.
Like I mentioned earlier, you absolutely need to be making snapshots. I'm currently running Manjiro, and I've completely borked my system like 10 times already. But when I set up my system, I made sure my main partition was BTRFS, which has allowed me to roll back easily through both the UI and in grub rescue mode.
I would also recommend that if you are going to continue to dual boot windows, make sure they're on two separate physical drives. And don't share stuff like your steam library, because windows likes to screw shit up, and steam will throw a fit if you make it read an NTFS drive on Linux.
Just don't give up, keep posting questions, and maybe even come back and post stuff like specific crash reports and system info so we can help you better. :)
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What sort of "simple" things did you have trouble with in Mint?
You could try popOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu. But without knowing what you struggled with, Mint should still be the best choice of you're new. Your troubles could just be the desktop environment you picked, or enabling third party/proprietary repositories. Or they could be a legit issue that is easily fixed using a different distro.
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MX Linux
Something listed in the top 10 or so on https://distrowatch.com/. Personally I like one of the Debian based distros.
Currently we use Ubuntu and Debian. Ubuntu would be the better of the two for beginners.
The distrowatch beginners list is: https://distrowatch.com/search-mobile.php?category=Beginners#simple
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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!
Your last point i learn it in the hard why and for the post i just wanted to see people suggests because everyone i asked near me says linux mint and i really hate it because what happened with me i already said what happened in the comments so i won't again
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Keep to popular distros. I'd personally recommend Pop os or fedora. Opensuse is up there too just never clicked with me when I was a new users.
I actually have started to discourage people using Ubuntu because of forced snap packages and multiple software store GUIs. It has led to a lot more confusion for new users even though Ubuntu is supposed to be user friendly.
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