So ive use windows pretty much for everything and ive kinda had a enough of windows. i was thinking of trying linux on an old laptop that i just upgraded to 8gb of ram and im not sure wha tos to put on it. i was thinking something lightweight maybe ubuntu mate? i need somethign like windows that will allow me to game and do other things liek gaming maybe even streaming or reading? idk. also what are some neede dsoftware, browser so rthigs needed for linux. i com efrom a family who has never trie dlinux and hates it because its “the smar advanced coders os” somethign liek that.
anyways im a noob so go easy on me please als i may have ben linux distro hopping but i still feel lost.
Linux Mint felt like a really good start for me. Its a nice transition from Windows because you still get a lot of functions that can be done outside of the command line. There’s a GUI for system updates, driver updates, and an app store of sorts. The interface is also just generally not all that different from Windows.
In my experience, I didnt have any issues running games on Mint. I was using a pretty powerful rig with AMD hardware, which tends to play nicer with Linux, but from what I’ve heard Mint seems to do well with gaming.
To play games, you’ll obviously need Steam with Proton enabled. I picked the latest full release version and it generally worked pretty good with most games. Some games that wont work with Steam might need a separate app called Lutris. For me this was just Battlefield 4, which also worked fine through Lutris. You can check ProtonDB to see if the games you wanna play will work.
If you use Nvidia, I’ve heard good things about Pop!OS but i havent used it myself.
Good luck finding a distro that works for you!