Valve's latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out now for December 2023, and it shows that Linux and Steam Deck overall finished 2023 on a very positive note.
Mint is a solid choice as a first Linux distribution, as it’s very user friendly and with cinnamon as Desktop Environment (GUI) build to be easily understood as windows user
A gaming focused distribution is not really necessary. Just pick a modern distribution you like and jump in. Wine, Steam, Proton can be installed on pretty much any modern distribution directly from the repository.
For a first try choose a distribution with good documentation and maybe a forum to ask (distribution specific) questions.
Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu are all good choices.
Personally I like Arch systems, but out of convenience I’m currently using Manjaro on my workstation - can’t really recommend this to a gaming focused first time user, although the Arch documentation/wiki is pretty great.
It depends a bit on how much time you want to invest to also learn about the Linux operating system or you just want to have something to game on and do some work with it.
Mint is a solid choice as a first Linux distribution, as it’s very user friendly and with cinnamon as Desktop Environment (GUI) build to be easily understood as windows user
A gaming focused distribution is not really necessary. Just pick a modern distribution you like and jump in. Wine, Steam, Proton can be installed on pretty much any modern distribution directly from the repository.
For a first try choose a distribution with good documentation and maybe a forum to ask (distribution specific) questions.
Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu are all good choices.
Personally I like Arch systems, but out of convenience I’m currently using Manjaro on my workstation - can’t really recommend this to a gaming focused first time user, although the Arch documentation/wiki is pretty great.
It depends a bit on how much time you want to invest to also learn about the Linux operating system or you just want to have something to game on and do some work with it.
I wouldn’t want to spend lots of time learning and troubleshooting. I’d just want to replace Windows as easily as possible.