Nobody is asking you what hardware you’re running or your use case…
If your computer is a couple years old and you’re doing general web browsing, then I would recommend Kubuntu 24.04, latest version of Linux Mint, or Debian.
If your computer is newer, as in a year old or so, I would recommend Kubuntu 25.10, latest version of Fedora(KDE/Plasma spin), or possibly CachyOS(Arch based).
If you’re a gamer, then same as above, Kubuntu 25.10, Fedora, or CachyOS, but I would highly recommend CachyOS in this instance.
The main things to consider for Linux is the version of the Kernel you may need and what Desktop Environment(Gnome, Plasma, Cinnamon, etc) you prefer.
The Linux Kernel is where most drivers will come from and are baked in. You can install proprietary drivers, but that process can vary depending on the distro.
The Desktop Environment is what you’ll be interacting with on a daily basis. Personally I prefer and highly recommend Plasma. It has great Wayland support(newer way to render and manage programs graphically) and customization is there if you need it. You CAN install multiple Desktop Environments at the same time and you’re not stuck with whatever is the default. But again, I’d recommend Plasma.
Now, why CachyOS? Simply because it has a lot of quality of life aspects available. It’s not a “gaming” distro, but it can be right out of the box. It’s built for speed, but also convenience in my opinion. Cachy can automatically detect and install the latest Nvidia drivers during the initial install. The “gaming” packages are a single click in their “CachyOS Hello” window on startup. And if you choose GRUB or Limine for your bootloader and BTRFS for your filesystem, you’ll have snapshots for recovery automatically setup for you(which saved my butt twice now).
Definitely try out a few distros. Personally I started with Mint and loved it, but I ran into driver issues eventually due to how they do kernel releases. Then tried Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, Endeavor, Debian…all of these never “kept” me because of something breaking or lack of timely driver updates. But I’m on CachyOS now and within a month of trying it I ended up switching all of my Windows machines to it, which I’ve never done before. I’ve never gone “full Linux” before, but Cachy pulled me right in. I’ve thrown it on multiple laptops, a NUC, and a desktop gaming PC and it’s “just worked” on all of them.
I totally understand and I do hate recommending Arch right from the start, but CachyOS is a great entry level Arch distro. The installer is pretty straight forward and setup is very minimal if you’re just going to game. The only thing lacking IMO, for beginners, is an “app store” with pretty pictures.
But if you’re gaming, I think you should be on the latest kernel possible, so a rolling release(Fedora) or bleeding edge(Arch). Latest Ubuntu derivative(25.10, soon 26.04) is fine but not ideal. It’s the main reason SteamOS is also based on Arch.
Again, not gaming? Mint is probably the defacto unless you’re on newer hardware.
I think if someone is a power user of Windows already then they can adapt to CachyOS as a new user. I’d recommend it to those people because I was that guy lol. The difficulty is…updating! Not using the OS. What does that mean actually for new people looking in?
Before updating. Every time. Which you do pretty often. That’s the point of rolling release. Sometimes you have to manually intervene, usually updating is uneventful. Let’s look at CachyOS January 2026 announcement for an example of eventful:
CachyOS says:
Manual changes for existing users:
KDE Plasma users with SDDM can now migrate to Plasma-Login-Manager. Please run:
What else is difficult? .pacnew files. What are those? Config file changes, basically. Pacman the package manager doesn’t deal with config files. You have your old file and the .pacnew file. You manually merge them. Install meld, it highlights the differences and provides arrows to move the changes easily into your existing config file of whatever got updated. How often? Not very. I’ve done it…under 15 times in a full year I think?
Now, I think a Windows power user can handle this. Someone scared of folder structures and doesn’t read error messages? No.
I have never, not once, looked at those announcement links.
And I just click on the fancy icon in my taskbar that runs pacman -Syu for me.
I’ll have to look at .pacnew, but again, I think you’re making this way bigger of an issue than it really is, these are pretty simple things to do and learn compared to other Linux bullshit I’ve had to deal with in the past.
Also, talking about updates, I remember an update in October? for two of my Windows PCs at the time that bricked Windows Update. The solution? Reinstall windows. So I installed Cachy instead.
*Edit, and I just looked at sddm/plasma, the latest plasma updates auto disabled sddm for me and enabled plasmalogin. So, not sure why it was a suggested manual change?
I was explaining what’s so “difficult” about running rolling release and best practice because I don’t think it’s all that difficult…😅 but nobody usually explains what people even mean by that. Unknown scary!!
If you want to ignore arch news…that’s up to you I don’t care. Long term things do go wrong now and then. Not that it’s a big deal with snapshots.
It’s pretty much exclusively about the update process for me. With fixed-release distros, you typically only have to actually pay attention, read news posts etc. before updating to a new major version, which in case of Ubuntu LTS happens every 2 years, which is a lot fewer opportunities to fuck up than Arch’s rolling release. Not insurmountable if you’re something of a power user or willing to put in the work to learn, but hardly the first choice for someone asking for an entry-level distro.
But if you’re gaming, I think you should be on the latest kernel possible, so a rolling release(Fedora) or bleeding edge(Arch). Latest Ubuntu derivative(25.10, soon 26.04) is fine but not ideal. It’s the main reason SteamOS is also based on Arch.
Ubuntu’s HWE kernel is just fine, even for LTS users. The only time it might not be enough is if you buy bleeding edge hardware. IME, the actual issue with Ubuntu for gaming is that sometimes you’ll need newer mesa packages, which needs to be acquired separately from the kernel, usually via PPA. If you’re playing newly-released AAA games, that does come up occasionally. e.g. I started using a mesa PPA when I got Elden Ring. Though I’m not sure if even that is necessary if you use the 6-monthly Ubuntu releases.
So yeah, if you’re that kind of gamer, Arch probably is a cleaner or at least equivalent solution than Ubuntu.
Nobody is asking you what hardware you’re running or your use case…
If your computer is a couple years old and you’re doing general web browsing, then I would recommend Kubuntu 24.04, latest version of Linux Mint, or Debian.
If your computer is newer, as in a year old or so, I would recommend Kubuntu 25.10, latest version of Fedora(KDE/Plasma spin), or possibly CachyOS(Arch based).
If you’re a gamer, then same as above, Kubuntu 25.10, Fedora, or CachyOS, but I would highly recommend CachyOS in this instance.
The main things to consider for Linux is the version of the Kernel you may need and what Desktop Environment(Gnome, Plasma, Cinnamon, etc) you prefer.
The Linux Kernel is where most drivers will come from and are baked in. You can install proprietary drivers, but that process can vary depending on the distro.
The Desktop Environment is what you’ll be interacting with on a daily basis. Personally I prefer and highly recommend Plasma. It has great Wayland support(newer way to render and manage programs graphically) and customization is there if you need it. You CAN install multiple Desktop Environments at the same time and you’re not stuck with whatever is the default. But again, I’d recommend Plasma.
Now, why CachyOS? Simply because it has a lot of quality of life aspects available. It’s not a “gaming” distro, but it can be right out of the box. It’s built for speed, but also convenience in my opinion. Cachy can automatically detect and install the latest Nvidia drivers during the initial install. The “gaming” packages are a single click in their “CachyOS Hello” window on startup. And if you choose GRUB or Limine for your bootloader and BTRFS for your filesystem, you’ll have snapshots for recovery automatically setup for you(which saved my butt twice now).
Definitely try out a few distros. Personally I started with Mint and loved it, but I ran into driver issues eventually due to how they do kernel releases. Then tried Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, Endeavor, Debian…all of these never “kept” me because of something breaking or lack of timely driver updates. But I’m on CachyOS now and within a month of trying it I ended up switching all of my Windows machines to it, which I’ve never done before. I’ve never gone “full Linux” before, but Cachy pulled me right in. I’ve thrown it on multiple laptops, a NUC, and a desktop gaming PC and it’s “just worked” on all of them.
IMO, Arch (which CachyOS is based on) is decidedly not an entry-level distro. Might be the smaller evil if you’re doing lots of gaming, though.
I totally understand and I do hate recommending Arch right from the start, but CachyOS is a great entry level Arch distro. The installer is pretty straight forward and setup is very minimal if you’re just going to game. The only thing lacking IMO, for beginners, is an “app store” with pretty pictures.
But if you’re gaming, I think you should be on the latest kernel possible, so a rolling release(Fedora) or bleeding edge(Arch). Latest Ubuntu derivative(25.10, soon 26.04) is fine but not ideal. It’s the main reason SteamOS is also based on Arch.
Again, not gaming? Mint is probably the defacto unless you’re on newer hardware.
I think if someone is a power user of Windows already then they can adapt to CachyOS as a new user. I’d recommend it to those people because I was that guy lol. The difficulty is…updating! Not using the OS. What does that mean actually for new people looking in?
You read:
https://archlinux.org/news/
https://discuss.cachyos.org/c/announcements/5
Before updating. Every time. Which you do pretty often. That’s the point of rolling release. Sometimes you have to manually intervene, usually updating is uneventful. Let’s look at CachyOS January 2026 announcement for an example of eventful:
CachyOS says:
Manual changes for existing users:
KDE Plasma users with SDDM can now migrate to Plasma-Login-Manager. Please run:
sudo pacman -Syu plasma-login-manager sudo systemctl disable sddm sudo systemctl enable plasmalogin sudo pacman -R sddm-kcm cachyos-themes-sddm sddmoutside of this the usual:
sudo pacman -SyuWhat else is difficult? .pacnew files. What are those? Config file changes, basically. Pacman the package manager doesn’t deal with config files. You have your old file and the .pacnew file. You manually merge them. Install meld, it highlights the differences and provides arrows to move the changes easily into your existing config file of whatever got updated. How often? Not very. I’ve done it…under 15 times in a full year I think?
Now, I think a Windows power user can handle this. Someone scared of folder structures and doesn’t read error messages? No.
I have been running CachyOS for 3 months now.
I have never, not once, looked at those announcement links.
And I just click on the fancy icon in my taskbar that runs pacman -Syu for me.
I’ll have to look at .pacnew, but again, I think you’re making this way bigger of an issue than it really is, these are pretty simple things to do and learn compared to other Linux bullshit I’ve had to deal with in the past.
Also, talking about updates, I remember an update in October? for two of my Windows PCs at the time that bricked Windows Update. The solution? Reinstall windows. So I installed Cachy instead.
*Edit, and I just looked at sddm/plasma, the latest plasma updates auto disabled sddm for me and enabled plasmalogin. So, not sure why it was a suggested manual change?
I was explaining what’s so “difficult” about running rolling release and best practice because I don’t think it’s all that difficult…😅 but nobody usually explains what people even mean by that. Unknown scary!!
If you want to ignore arch news…that’s up to you I don’t care. Long term things do go wrong now and then. Not that it’s a big deal with snapshots.
It’s pretty much exclusively about the update process for me. With fixed-release distros, you typically only have to actually pay attention, read news posts etc. before updating to a new major version, which in case of Ubuntu LTS happens every 2 years, which is a lot fewer opportunities to fuck up than Arch’s rolling release. Not insurmountable if you’re something of a power user or willing to put in the work to learn, but hardly the first choice for someone asking for an entry-level distro.
Ubuntu’s HWE kernel is just fine, even for LTS users. The only time it might not be enough is if you buy bleeding edge hardware. IME, the actual issue with Ubuntu for gaming is that sometimes you’ll need newer mesa packages, which needs to be acquired separately from the kernel, usually via PPA. If you’re playing newly-released AAA games, that does come up occasionally. e.g. I started using a mesa PPA when I got Elden Ring. Though I’m not sure if even that is necessary if you use the 6-monthly Ubuntu releases.
So yeah, if you’re that kind of gamer, Arch probably is a cleaner or at least equivalent solution than Ubuntu.