I’d suggest OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and one of the UBlue images - maybe Bazzite, since you mentioned gaming. But Steam and GOG run on all of those.

first off, do you realize where we’re at? normies don’t frequent lemmy

No need to be passive aggressive, but if you think all people on lemmy are so tech savvy, then why post it here?

https://joinmobilizon.org/

Maybe you can also find open source communities in your area. After some digging, I was surprised how many groups there are in my area and they are always happy to get additional hands to organize stuff or run errands etc.

Sure it’s allowed, but we have these questions a lot, so some enthusiasts made some really great posts with tons of info, for example:

https://lemmy.ml/post/12123645

https://lemmy.ml/post/18268622

I’d recommend to read through them, then come back and ask more specific questions.

For all those suggesting Bazzite, Ublue (including Bazzite) images are offline installers only, see: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/couldnt-get-aurora-into-test-mode-in-live-usb/4567

Oh good to know, last time I checked they said on their website they’re not supporting it. That’s great news, thanks!

Yeah Waydroid doesn’t support these yet sadly.

Waydroid not working? You don’t happen to have an Nvidia card, do you?

I really like Mint, but I wouldn’t say it “has relatively up-to-date updates”.

First thing that came to mind was Fedora, if you are willing to try an immutable distro I highly recommend Bazzite, but tinkering has its limits there.

Coral Cove

I didn’t say it was. I posted the quote from the website to clarify.

From their website:

"Update on Your Terms

Pop!_OS provides the latest features and security patches through rolling updates and periodic OS version upgrades, to be performed at your discretion. And if you want a clean slate, the Refresh Install feature resets your OS while preserving the files in your Home folder. "

From the website: “We are starting with iOS and Android games because this is where most dark patterns appear, but we will be adding other platforms soon.” So that looks good for your request.

You might misunderstand how their “ratings” work - they simply collect all reports and when people had trouble with the game before, and gave a negative or “tinkering required” rating, it will show in the overall stats.

Depends on what you are playing, but gaming in Linux has come a long way. Some games won’t work due to companies not enabling their (rootkit) “anti-cheats” for Linux, but other than that, there’s more and more games that simply work by the day. Check out https://www.protondb.com/ to get an idea of what’s working at the moment.

I really liked it, I had the Flatpak version installed, but when opening larger text documents (with 20+ pages) it took forever to open them, so I stopped using it.

What a stupid headline.

“So who are these people? They’re a bit more likely to be female. While both the comparison groups were roughly evenly split between male and female, the superspreaders were 60 percent female. They’re also older, on average 58 years old, nearly 20 years older than the sample as a whole.”

One important part for gaming is the graphics card - I cannot comment on that particular one, but I would recommend searching it like “nvidia rtx 4070 + linux” so you can find advice and recommendations. You could also hop over to https://www.protondb.com/, select that card and see what most people are running. Or there is this https://linux-hardware.org/ page, where you find lots of info about whats being recommended.

Nvidia used to be problematic with Linux, but I also have an older Nvidia card and haven’t run into any problems (yet). Also there’s lots of new development in that area, I’m sure it’s gonna be ok. Also some distros offer preinstalled Nvidia drivers that you simply select in a driver manager - that for example is the case for Linux Mint.

Keep at it, you got this and there’s so many people and resources online to help. Best of luck!

The usual suspects are Bazzite, Garuda, Nobara. But you can game on every distro. To give proper advice, some info on your hardware would be needed.