Linux

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

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.

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

https://getaurora.dev/en

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.

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A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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.

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...

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.

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.

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

Linux Mint Debian Edition.

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

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."

Linux Mint

https://fedoraproject.org/kde/

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.

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.

My advice: Stick to distros and softwares that are widely used. When presented with options, use 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.

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 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'm not sure that you can get wallpaper engine running. Maybe someone else can say otherwise, but I wouldn't trust second hand.

If you're new then fedora is great