@lina while a lot has been talked about the Fedora side, I'm personally looking at KDE Linux.

Arch-based is probably not great for people who aren't looking to tinker, which is why KDE Linux being an immutable Arch-based as a more generalist counterpart to SteamOS could be interesting.

@lina Right... Mint is also based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, this impacts how quickly you will see packaged security updates that originated at Debian.

Fedora is good, but it's an update treadmill. If you don't play games and just want a wife-friendly stable, maintained OS that you only have to security update (can be automated; no reinstalls needed) consider https://rockylinux.org . Ultimately based on fedora, Rocky releases have a 10 year lifetime with security updates.

@lina
In my experience Ubuntu has become much better at keeping up than they used to. The LTS releases update drivers through hardware enablement kernel updates. And they keep the graphics and sound stacks fairly well updated these days.

I don't know how closely Mint tracks the Ubuntu LTS updates though.

@lina@vt.social At least in my opinion, the only rough part of Fedora (particularly for people switching over from Windows) is the NVIDIA situation, since I'd imagine a decent chunk of Windows users (streamers especially thanks to them generally wanting extra-strong GPUs) will be coming over with an NVIDIA system and thus they get to deal with getting the akmod from RPMFusion and having to give it a few minutes any time they update for it to actually rebuild (I also, anecdotally, had some issues with the live USB back when I was rocking a 3060 purely because the drivers had a tendency to do weird things after a certain amount of time, like the screen going black. This was around Fedora 40 though, so it could be different now).

However, Fedora is indeed very good! I daily drive it on both my desktop and laptop (rocking KDE for both, which was actually part of my reasoning for choosing Fedora in the first place! Some of the best KDE support I've seen ^-^) and it keeps me very up-to-date on software. I'd imagine Nobara or Ultramarine are even better for super new users, given that they're more of batteries-included Fedora.

*Note: While Mint currently releases every 6 months, their base software only upgrades every 2 years, on an LTS cycle (following Ubuntu LTS or Debian). Only some parts are upgraded on the 6-month cycle, and they are considering doing slower releases in the future.

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4991

@lina It's at least helpful that people can get a lot of recent software using Flatpak on Mint, while also getting a stable and familiar UI in Cinnamon! It's not the perfect distro for power users, but things are a lot better than they used to be on it.

Personally I do NOT recommend Fedora because of their corporate stance on certain things like how they disable hardware video encoding in drivers even when there is no legal precedent saying that it's legally required for them to do so. And recommending people install the "freeworld" version of Mesa is a bit much.

@lina This might not be true anymore, but I’ve specifically found Nobara Linux to be the best version of Fedora for streaming and gaming!! Everything is ready to go out of the box (including NVIDIA drivers ^^;;) and it’s been the least amount of issue I’ve had when trying Linux for streaming