About to redo my system, things went sideways when trying to upgrade to mint 22. What distro is everyone using. This would be the point I can switch if I really want to leave mint. I had been using mint 21.3 with kde plasma
Windows 11 is not linux, I am not going back to windows!
Really poking that bear, huh? 
I previously expressed an honest opinion, which folks didn’t seem to care for, but I’ll try to be helpful here once again. Assuming the OP is looking for a distro to game on, I would recommend one of:
- The Ubuntu family, latest not LTS. Doesn’t really matter which, it all comes from the same repo.
- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
- Fedora Workstation
The reason I suggest these three is that they are major distros that stay reasonably up-to-date. Tumbleweed will be the most up-to-date of the three, being a rolling release. The other two follow a six to eight month release cycle, but stay reasonably fresh. Ubuntu has the advantage of the largest package repos and widest vendor support, and the disadvantage that Canonical has been pushing snaps hard in the last few years, going as far as replacing some packages like Firefox. The disadvantage to both Fedora and Tumbleweed is that they rely on third-party repos for patent-encumbered software (like graphics drivers and audio/video codecs).
If you want to go difficult mode, you can choose Arch for a current distro with a large package repo, including non-free software. Likewise, you could choose Debian, but unless you’re running Testing or Unstable, the packages will be quite stale. The downside to running Testing or Unstable is the potential for system breakage, and the need to read patch notes before blindly updating (this is also an issue for Arch).
Of course, I caveat the above by reiterating that even when I ran Linux as my desktop OS, I kept a separate Windows box only for running games. I basically treated it like an Xbox (except an Xbox is far more locked down).
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I would -1 for Fedora as it can be somewhat resource hungry
Any distro is the same as any other; it hardly matters anymore. That being said, here are some suggestions:
- Fedora Silverblue: atomic distro that you can’t brick
- CachyOS: if you want Gentoo’s placebo effect from compiling with all the turbo optimizations, but without doing all the work
- Bazzite: gaming-focused distro
- vanilla Arch: so you can say
I use Arch btwwith a straight face
Unse Nix OS:
never going to have issues of packege incompatibilities.
and its bleeding edge at the same time.
you can run multible versions of one package at the same time.
after each update a copy is saved of your old system, so in case anything breaks for you, you can always role back, by selecting the older version in grub.
also it has the best packet manager in the game, imo
easy to track what changed and what is installed.
configure once and you can always rebuild your system the way it was.
Distros still differ in:
- Package availability
- Update frequency
- Trust and stability of maintainers
- Availability of support
Those latter two are of particular importance. You don’t want to invest time and energy in a niche distro just to have its lead (and sometimes sole) maintainer decide he’s bored with the project now and walk away. You also don’t want to have a problem, search for a fix, and then have Google shrug at you because so few use the OS that hardly anyone is posting to blogs or reddit with problems and solutions.
No offense to the OP, but you’re responding to someone who just had a problem with Linux Mint that he couldn’t recover from. I don’t know if he’s ready for Nix.
I’m just using plain Debian with wine. Works for me and is stable. Not the newest versions of software, but stable software.
The opposite is Opensuse Tumbleweed i guess. Before debian i used the regular opensuse, but they had cut off i686 too early for my opinion. So i was forced to use Opensuse Tumbleweed before i went to debian. With Tumbleweed, I learned never again to touch a rolling release linux. On one hand you get about 1 Gb of updates each or each second day. Constantly. Because this is the concept of rolling. A consequence is, that software can only be tested in a basic way, because time is too short before the next updated packages get pushed out. I had all kind of issues. Kernels not booting, programs crashing, configurations files not updated to reflect software changes. All no problem of course…just wait two days and hope the new packages fix it until it possibly breaks again after 2 more days. This cured me in such a way that i had to go to a completely stable debian system to get my sanity again.
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I have been running Eve Online ( among other games ) on as little as, this old hardware;
HP SFF 6200 Pro
CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i3-2100
RAM: 8 GB
SSD for OS: 240 GB PNY
Game operated from: WD Black 2 TB
I was testing in Xubuntu last year, but Manjaro with Xfce DE has it beat on both performance and ease of setup. I just happen to like Xfce Desktop Environment, but they offer builds with KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon, etc.. Manjaro is Arch Linux based and Xubuntu is Ubuntu based. I doubt anyone would notice much of a difference between them. Arch uses Pacman instead of Apt Get at terminal level but you can always install apt if need be. Otherwise you shouldn’t have any issue finding new software packages using the UI system menu Add/Remove Software, which of course is just pamac-manager %U at the terminal prompt. No steep learning curve, I have 8 refurbished boxes with Majaro on them gifted to seniors. No complaints from those people, so far.
Something here for those of you looking at Debian systems, SparkyLinux made this distro about 10 years ago. SparkyLinux 4.0 “GameOver” is a heavy distro with games, emulators, wine, Steam, Lutris, etc. all preinstalled.
This site states, minimum system requirements for SparkyLinux “GameOver”:
- CPU i586 / amd64
- 256 MB of RAM memory (some games need more than that – 500-1000MB recommended)
- an optical DVD drive or 4GB USB stick for Live medium
- 20 GB of space for installation on a hard drive (30GB recommended)
- 16 GB of Flash/Pen USB drive for “normal” installation (32GB recommended)
I got it up and running on the thumb drive demo and was able to play several online games from it without installing it to the PC. Also as mentioned before, my test box is only i-3 core. The trial is so fully loaded there wasn’t much need to add anything. If you attempt this yourself, I recommend a USB 3.0. I was “stuck” with the limitation of USB 2.0 hardware and a 3.0 thumb drive.
Whatever you decide on your final distro, enjoy your Linux OS!
I ran Tumbleweed for about four years. I don’t recall having too many problems with it. That said, I updated on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, not whenever new packages dropped. I also followed the subreddit and OS mailing lists, which (IMO) is a prerequisite for using any rolling distro, be it TW, Debian Unstable, Arch, etc. On Debian, you should also install apt-listchanges and apt-listbugs, and of course, read the output before proceeding with updates.
I tried tumbleweed but things about it I did not like. Had to keep going on the Konsol to get wifi to start. It would just time out in the regular interface! So ended up going to fedora. Currently redownloading eve as I write this.
exaly that is the reason why i recomand nix.
its not that hard o figure out how the configuration.nix works.
and if you do something wrong there your system wont break because it wont build.
and if you did something wrong you can go back to the config delete your recent changes.
and try a new approach. until you have a successful build
i believe if you can wrap your head around the config its one of the most user friendly distros out there.
also its quite easy to share the content of your config and get help from other people to fix typos or whatever to make your system build properly
That’s quite the caveat, though. It’s like saying, “Once you learn Lisp, Emacs is a breeze to configure.” Which is true (sort of), but it’s a hefty pre-req.
My point was that from a system management perspective, Nix OS is different enough from other Linux distros to be its own beast. Sysadmin skills acquired using other distros don’t readily translate. It would be like switching from Linux Mint to FreeBSD—all the same software, but a completely different means of configuring and maintaining your system.
Can the OP learn Nix and its configuration DSL? Perhaps. But doing so will present additional obstacles versus moving from Linux Mint to Ubuntu or Debian, where under the covers things are mostly the same.
I always found straight Debian to be the easiest to deal with.
It didn’t have everything out of the box but it was simple enough to configure and it was a set and forget solution for my needs (file servers, an interface to control greenhouse things (i.e. temperature controls, feeders etc) and it always ran well on a raspberry pi which was a requirement.
I used Fedora on my desktop as my daily for years until work programmes pushed me to windows, but for all the years I used it I found it to be pretty good aside from the things Debian had that it did not (but equivalents exist). I did run that on a beefy computer though. It ran like dog chod on a Chromebook, yet windows 11 runs well on the same machine (well, but warm), I’d like to swap that out for Debian vut drivers may be a problem as they were on Fedora, as Chromebooks aren’t really designed for what I use them for and drivers can be dicey.
Finally finished installing eve on Fedora with the launcher and software from eve-tools, you know the people from Eve-o. Anyway night and day from my time when I used Mint 21.3. All video settings on high and not freezing up any longer. On mint 21.3 I was just about in potato mode before the game would not freeze on me.
I have delt with complicated before, I ran I3wm for a while and that was a royal pain.
please are you serious?
go nixvim or go home 
yes and that is the issue if OP is not compfy with mint or whatever what makes you believe he will be more comfy with a system that works just the same.
basicly the linux world is devided by 3 major packet managers
apt
yum/dnf
pacman
and they all work more or less the same
that is the first desision you have to make what suits you best
so to be productive on this matter what would a easy to use distro have to achive out of the box?
easy to install
suport for appimage and flatpacks
non-free packages
easy update process
Lutris and/or steam sould work out of the box as well
native to wayland
next choice would be the desktop enviroment
that is just personal preference
and the mayor distros almost all have flavors to chose from
and in this regard i would suggest kubuntu
its the closest to were you dont have to fiddle around with out of the box.
also im curious about kdeneon myself never tested it but it might be worth a shot
I’ve been a vi/vim user for 30 years. These days, its neovim for me, but I did use Emacs for a few years and really got into it. Ultimately though, as an IDE, it just wasn’t satisfactorily performant. And I had to learn Lisp.
I get what you’re saying. I really do. I’m just making the point that it’s an additional investment in time and energy to learn Y versus X if X is approximate to Z, Y is orthogonal to Z, and you have already mastered some fraction of Z. And since you aren’t at all familiar with Y, that investment is also speculative. You may like Y better than X/Z, but if you don’t, then it will have been time and effort not well spent.
I am in multiple general support channels and forums.
Current top recommendations:
- Fedora - semi-rolling, not so bleeding edge that it has loads of bugs, not LTS and so avoids being stagnant and it has a lot of desktop environment “spins”.
- Nobara - made for gamers by a Redhat Engineer, who is very reachable via their Discord and based on Fedora, will have more bugs than Fedora because it is more bleeding edge.
- EndeavourOS - basically Arch but easier to install.
- Gentoo - great if you want to push a few 1%s out of an enthusiast’s build but not recommended for people new to Linux.
The whole Debian family either has out of date core packages, can fail to upgrade, is out of date because they were working on a bespoke desktop environment, uses snap, lacks support due to low user numbers and or has “special sauce” (especially Mint) they will come to us with a problem and there are no solutions, either no other results online or only other people asking the same question.
Manjaro has issues, I wouldn’t trust it personally.
Garuda looked at Manjaro and Mint then said, “Hold my beer!”
P.S. Fedora “bloat” comes down to the “spin” you select and the desktop environment and packages that come with it.
P.P.S. I am not a Fedora fan, I have it installed on my TV’s “entertainment centre” PC and it is fine, gets the job done as described above. On my main machine, I am migrating from Ubuntu to Gentoo.
Don’t about why, but it seems you had some bad experience with a debian based distro.
However your definition of “outdated” is not everyones. E.g. i have to problem to get the latest wine-staging installed on debian. All packages are as recent as they need to be for productivity. And they are also bugfixed. Also there is no snap preinstalled. It is possible but not preinstalled.
The stance on user numbers also falls apart, when e.g. compared with distrowatch numbers and also their polls.