A lot of folks will recommend Mint as the first option, since it's pretty straightforward and will feel a lot like older editions of Windows. Personally, I use Fedora Plasma, because it feels like what Windows 11 should have been, and it supports just about everything I've thrown at it. It's got pretty broad support, so it's easy to get into.

And there’s the issue. Guy is confused, and everyone is recommending him ten thousand distros. We need to understand that not everyone understands half of what we talk about more than half the time.

OP: just get mint, try it out, make a thread again in a couple months if you need help choosing another distro.

I'm using Nobara and Fedora. I think Mint is the most popular.

Check out distrowatch.com it explains it well.

Choosing a distro is both very easy and very hard. The easy answer is go with the flow, look for what the most popular distros are and see what appeals from those. A common distro will have lots of other people with the possibility of having the same issues you have finding solutions. It makes troubleshooting way easier and is worth the distro not being perfect if you can get more support.

The hard answer is don't choose a distro. Try distros. Maybe before killing your Windows install get VirtualBox and install various distros in VMs and try them out. Performance is fairly good in a VM so you can get a realistic idea if how it will work for you in terms of how intuitive it is to find things, how the workflow is, and whether it is too opinionated about how things are done.

For example, Ubuntu has a little less ability to control things at a deep level, but it is more supportable because everyone using it either does or does not have a given problem.

At the other end is something like Arch which is more of a base than a distro. You choose your desktop environment, what services you want, all the back ends, and you have to configure it yourself.

I would recommend EndeavourOS as a great Arch based distro.

Linux takes like 5-10mins to setup. You can dedicate your first day/week to trying out a few different flavors to see which one you like.

I'd try distro's in this order Mint with Cinnamon > fedora KDE > Ubuntu Gnome > cachyOS if you're a baller > Arch if you want to learn and break things while doing it > NixOS if you absolutely hate having things work easily and learning transferable knowledge.

All that matters is that you pick something popular enough that you can easily Google any issues that might arise.

The big ones for general use are Ubuntu and Fedora. KDE is gonna feel most windows like on any distro.

If you want something security focused there's quebesOS that breaks everything out into VMs. For gaming there's bazzite which is just modified fedora and several other gaming spins like steamOS.

Just pick something. They are all free (nearly all of them), so you can always install something else pretty easily. Spend some time to get your feet wet and get the lay of the land. After a week or two, you'll probably have a really good direction on what you actually want. You can also run them as live oses, so download a few with different Desktop Environments you think are interesting and test them out. Then install one.

I'm still going to ask how you ended up with a server CPU. Does it help with the tasks you do?

Do you have HDR monitors? If you do and care about having the HDR part working, you'll likely want to pick one that uses KDE Plasma for the desktop environment.

There’s a lot of good suggestions here and I wanted to add pop os! it’s a beginner friendly Linux distribution but with more of a focus on gaming.