100% agree, and made pretty much the same point in the LTT forum a while back. Flavor of the month people annoy tf out of me, I’ve been a linux user for over a decade and have never even thought of recommending something outside of the big 3 (debian/ubuntu (or mint if that’s your thing), fedora, arch)

Tried and true distros are the only real option and IMO the difference between distros once everything is configured is mininal

This is true, i didn’t read the part where he’s keeping everything except the motherboard/cpu. I’m used to switching out to random gpus LMAO

For your linux partition you’d probably just need to install new drivers. I’ve popped my boot drive into a bunch of different pcs with no issue.

Your windows partition might be weird, last i heard it assigns the activation to the motherboard serial number or something so you might have to redo the crack or provide your activation code again

Well Zorin is ubuntu based, so i feel like that’s a win for Ubuntu (and debian)

Thankfully, this doesn’t seem to apply to code written outside of the Arduino ecosystem, so i ASSUME that if you’re writing code for a cloned board using PlatformIO that these new terms don’t apply to you

If that’s not the case, I’ll switch to micropython (probably easier anyway)

Third’d

Mint or any other ubuntu-derivative distro is 10000% the move. I’ve been running ubuntu as my os for a while now, and I’ve spent nearly the last decade on linux (makes me feel old saying that lol).

The other distros have a lot of strength, but at the end of the day i want to spend my time messing with things i want to mess with. I don’t want random weird issues that I have to constantly debug, and everyone can agree that stability is debian’s (and therefore ubuntu’s) undisputed strength

No worries :) everyone starts somewhere.

The other commenter covered the terminology so to your point about being on Nvidia:

I know we don’t like Reddit but here. Seems to be YMMV and you’ll never know if you don’t try. Also possible that the things that are buggy aren’t things you use/care about

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

FWIW I run Ubuntu and do some gaming. Haven’t hit any issues, and I’ve run multiple AAA games on release (TLOU, Indiana Jones, Hogwarts Legacy, GoW 2018) as well as other, lighter, titles like Cities Skylines 2, Asetto Corsa, Project Cars, American Truck Simulator

I’m sure there are bugs that I haven’t experienced, and my system is probably newer/higher performance than the average person + i chose parts with Linux in mind. But based on my experience, I wouldn’t tell someone to jump into a less user friendly distro because of problems I myself haven’t run into. Much better to try one, see if you hit an issue, then jump rather than doing the hard one up front

Consider your library: most games will be able to run fine on Linux. However, if you predominantly play online multiplayer games which require anticheat you should check compatibility on ProtonDB.

Second, consider your hardware: if your GPU is AMD you’re good to go. Nvidia might have issues (not sure if this has been resolved since I last had to look into it).

Finally, choose a distro: I’d recommend Ubuntu or anything Ubuntu-based. There’s a lot of mixed answers in the Linux community and definitely a ton of hate for Ubuntu. However, as someone who has been running Linux for nearly a decade at this point, there are a few key points:

1. Ubuntu is debian based, so it’s extremely stable(but not as slow to update)

2. Ubuntu is very beginner friendly, and you won’t need to touch the terminal if you don’t want to

3. Everyone hates on snaps, but for you I don’t think you’ll run into an issue with it.

Personally, I steer towards debian based distros for my devices as well because I’d rather spend time messing with the software I’m running or other things NOT debugging why my config is suddenly shitting the bed