Hm… LMDE is Debian under the hood, so if you have non standard requirements then you have to be flexible to make something to work, combining .deb repositories with other solutions like flatpaks, distrobox, compiling from source, nix, guix, appimages, wine prefixes, etc. Just don’t mess with system directories and libraries and you’re good.

Maybe Mint were a better choice to a newbie, but in the end it’s almost the same thing with some nice driver utilities. Look for the release in December.

Try Debian, nut ubuntu, it just makes problems

Between these two, Cachy.

If choice is open: Fedora.

“Gaming” focussed distros are often a worse choice imo, because they offer zero performance benefit, are bloated in an attempt to bundle drivers out of the box, are harder to troubleshoot because worse documentation, and the preinstalled configs can cause headaches.

Caution, dual-boot means you have to power down your system before you can start the other, if you share any file systems. Hibernate and then booting another distro will result in file system damage.

The alternative would be a virtual machine.

It can also occasionally mess up the grub configuration, which means you have to reinstall grub.

If you want a good first Linux experience, stick with anything Ubuntu-/Debian-based; they are

• stable workhorses, i.e. they don’t break on you as easily as rolling release distros like CachyOS.
• wildly popular, i.e. you’ll find plenty of resources to help you get started (although, to be fair, the Arch wiki is also ridiculously detailed).

Whatever you do, steer clear of immutable distros like Bazzite for now. As cool as the concept is (I run Bazzite on my gaming machine) - as soon as you do something “non-standard” (and modding your Minecraft .jar with Optifine already qualifies as such), you’ll have to fiddle with the terminal and distrobox containers, both of which will be alien concepts for you at the start and may be top much to make it a good first impression.

helpful

In my opinion vanilla Fedora is the best beginner distro. And once you get comfortable with Linux you can try Arch, CashyOS, rpm-ostree based distros or anything else.

Might just be my old experience (happy to learn otherwise) but dual booting ended up with more of a painful experience than not. When Windows would update, it would fuck my grub up and cause issues booting into Linux and Windows. You can fix it (most of the time) but expect to do it rather often; especially unpleasant as a beginner.

I know there’s issues with GPU passthrough on vms but IDK if dual booting is the moves unless they seriously improved the experience in the last couple years.

Seeing as you have an Nvidia card, I’d caution against Ubuntu. People talk about how “stable” it is, but it’ll break on it’s own even if you don’t try to update it, and it’s all because of Nvidia drivers.

I recommend getting a distro that has the Nvidia drivers baked it, which mostly narrows it down to Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS, or Pop!OS.

I’m personally not a fan of Pop! since it’s based on Debian.

I personally use Nobara right now since it’s essentially Bazzite if it weren’t immutable. It’s OK. It does some things well and has some headaches.

I recently had to dual-boot CachyOS alongside Nobara. I haven’t had much time to tinker with it, but it’s definitely different. But one big benefit to Cachy is that you can pick whatever desktop environment and bootloaders you want. Just pick the correspondjng option in the installer.

At the end of the day, Bazzit, Nobara, and Cachy all have the same gaming-focusses system optimizations. It just boils down to specifics from there

I would throw bazzite in as an option, especially for a new user.

Bazzite has a good out of the box experience, is meant for gaming, and it uses an immutable distro.

In my opinion the only reason people don’t like immutable distros is bad habits that are hard to break, or wanting highly custom system configurations, both do not apply to a new user. If you never go into the terminal there’s no difference, and if you do a system like brew works pretty well.

The advantage of an immutable system are that you can’t mess up your system and it’s more secure. It also stops you from doing dangerous things or leasing habits that require modifying system packages without knowing what they do.

For just gaming and desktop use (with KDE), it’s a good low maintenance system.

CachyOS or Ubuntu?

With all due respect to Ubuntu, but this isn’t even a comparison. I’d try to give you a fair answer if you’d stated Garuda, for example, or Nobara, or Bazzite instead of Ubuntu, because these distros actually put in an effort for gaming specifically, but Ubuntu? It’s a workstation distro and it’s gaming performance is basically whatever the default is on “Linux” as a whole.

I have personally been using CachyOS for over two years now and I’ve been very happy with it. Their installer recognizes your gpu automatically and installs the right drivers for you.

Not to take away from the other ones, I’m sure they have amazing work/performance, too, but this is my experience because I’ve tried all of the distros I’ve mentioned above and CachyOS was the best for me personally.

Your mileage may vary of course. The best thing to do is try different distros and find out for yourself. Make sure your data is backed up while you hop between them until you chose one.

IMO Fedora can do everything that Ubuntu does, without snap or the opinionated Cannonical stuff, it’s an easy GUI installer, has better defaults (except you need to manually add non-fre repos, trivial), and wide software compatibility. You can’t go wrong with Fedora unless you specifically hate having up to date software or major updates every 6-12 months.

Cachy is a fine distro too I guess. I’d probably use EndeavorOS instead. Any distro with a relatively recent graphics stack is going to game the same. The QoL stuff around the margins is going to be more important than the 2% optimization you get from Cachy’s kernel, and cachyos-proton can be run on steam in any distro.

I’m not a programmer either. Never have been. You don’t need to be one to use any desktop distro. You’d be fine with CachyOS. It is popular enough that getting help with anything that does pop up should be easy. I’ve used it as well as Nobara and Bazzite. Ultimately, I landed on Bazzite. That was about a year ago and I am happy.

You’re not me. You will have different tastes too me. No point you using the distros I like. Do what everybody else does, experiment, try a few, read about them. The are loads out there all with little quirks and differences. Try L/K/X/Ubuntu, try cachyos / arch, try void, try Gentoo, try popos… Have a look at distrowatch for loads of inspiration.

Any and all distros can use and run any software any other distro runs so they can all do the same stuff, just they all get there in slightly different ways.

I can’t really tell you what will work for you, but I took a similar starting path…

When I finally took linux seriously as my Primary OS a few years ago, I too picked LMDE, and generally thought it was good. I eventually moved on because I wanted access to newer stuff like Nvidia drivers.

My next distro was Fedora KDE Edition, and.tjis would be my generic recommendation for anyone coming from Windows. Rolling updates isn’t scary, actually it means you don’t have a terrifying big upgrade looming on the horizon.

About a year ago I started hand-crafting my own Hyprland on Arch setup. It’s great. Bleeding edge stuff, and contrary to the memes it’s actually been the easiest to maintain - possibly because I only have the packages I need. BUT I wouldn’t recommend this for someone without a software engineering background.

I also dabbled withe EndeavourOS which deserves a shout.