The days of “chanting magic spells at computer” being synonymous with the Linux experience are far gone. I recommend you just make a Fedora installer and take it for a spin on the live test system! You don’t need to commit to it to just try it
I can only confidently answer for some of these
the Heroic launcher is probably what you’re looking for and it should work really well. You may also be interested in looking up Lutris and Bottles for other games.
these should work 1:1 on most desktop enviroments from my experience. If not, they should be quite easy to configure
most of the time software will be available natively as a Debian package, and then other distros. Sometimes there won’t be a native package for your system, especially if you use anything outside of Debian, Arch, Fedora or their derivatives. If that happens there’s distro agnostic Flatpak, which works a charm. You also have tools like alien or dpkg, which convert formats from one system to a different one. They are slightly hit and miss, but a great tool if you’ve exhausted othe avenues
I vovch for what other people have said, Fedora KDE. It works out of the box, has lots of customizability and you don’t need to use the command line much at all. You might be interested in lagging one version behind (the three latest distros are supported at any given time, to allow people to skip one when updating) and install Fedora 39 so that any possible bugs are completely ironed out and compatibility of packages and programs is higher.
I would also recommend Linux Mint 21.3 (for the same reasons as I said to lag one version behind with Fedora, I would recommend to only update between one X.3 version and the next X.3 version) but the Cinnamon desktop environment might be a bit simple for what you’re looking for. It’s made for people coming from Windows though, so it will feel very familiar.
Boot them both up as a live system and fiddle around with them for a bit. You can keep your session and everything in it as long as you don’t unplug the pendrive or reboot the computer, so you can reslly take it for a week- or a month-long spin if you really want.
I know! Will definitely try again at the next release. So far I’m running a minimal install of Arch without DE (only running Sway) and it works pretty well, but I’m not a fan of the bleeding edge release schedule. Wouls prefer something more stable, especially for that laptop which I don’t plan on using as my daily driver
I tried to get it running on a 2 GiB RAM laptop I’ve got, but couldn’t get wifi to work at all
yea just go mint it’s goated.
I get that, but even my .ods files get slightly fucked up when I only ever edit them with LibreOffice. That being said, I’m a staunch supporter and I will always send my text files as .odt and my slideshows as .odp, and I keep donating money in hopes it’ll improve in the future (and for fuck’s sake, the UI shouldn’t be that important, but it is. It might as well be one of the biggest barriers of entry for normies, it’s not a good thing that FOSS always looks either outdated or overcomplicated)
What’s bad about it? It has better compatibility from my experience, and the UI doesn’t look ass. I’m a big fan of LibreOffice, but unless you’re only editing OpenDocument Format files it doesn’t work that well most of the time (and even if you are… I have tried, but god, does the OpenDocument Foundation need some money funneled into it. I never get .ods to work the way I want to)
If you are going to play games you might as well go and try Bazzite instead! It’s built on a Fedora base with some good additions:
It’s atomic: this basically means that everytime yov boot your computer you’ll have the choice of booting onto the newest version of your system, or the one before. If you fuck up anything it’s as easy as reverting to the last version where things were alright!
It comes with a bunch of preloaded drivers and compatibility layers: makes compatibility with modern games and software as good as you can get it without having to tinker heaps. It’s pretty seamless.
The installer includes many programs by default. Just tick a few boxes and you can choose to have Spotify, OBS, Discord or Darktable automatically installed in your computer
As for the documented support you can probably go a long way with the Arch, Gentoo and Fedora wikis. Other than that I’m afraid it’s gonna be relying on forums and Reddit. I’ve never irreversably broken my Fedora system for what is worth, and I don’t consider myself that tech savvy!
Game support is also really good these days. Anything that you can play via Steam will basically run. And performance is better for some games on Linux these days! Itch.io also has good support I think. You should be able to run most things that don’t use shady anti-cheat, but forget about League of Legends, Valorant or Fortnite.
I’m not sure what you mean by Linux version! But Fedora (and Bazzite) belong to their own “branch” of Linux, apart from Debian and Arch. Their philosophy is a balance between rock-solid stability (Debian) vs bleeding-edge software (Arch) that many people, including me, think hits the sweet spot quite well!
If there’s anything I missed or you are curious feel free to ask more questions :)