Your case sounds like a perfect fit for Bazzite or Aurora.

• Both come already set up ootb, with all quality of life tweaks you want and need.
• They are image based distros (“immutable”), so you mainly work in your /var/ and /home/ directory, and all the other stuff is untouched and clean.
• They are very modern, getting the same updates at the same time as upstream Fedora.
• Running Ollama is just one ujust command away, many complex things are made easier with those commands
• You probably won’t get a lot more performance I believe. At least when I switched from regular Fedora/ Silverblue to Bazzite, I didn’t notice many more FPS in games for example.

It’s a mastodon post where “Fedora” is typed as a hashtag, and then it is followed by “Linux 41…”. The title should say “Fedora Linux 41 will be released on October 29”

Bazzite Bazzite Bazzite!

I was at the same point a while ago.

Everything I touch breaks, and I also had enough of my system breaking because updating with an unstable power grid is like playing russian roulette.

I turned to Fedora Silverblue first, then rebased to uBlue. Aurora first, and then Bazzite. Silverblue feels exactly as the regular variant, Aurora is great for desktop use, and for my gaming PC, Bazzite is fucking great. It just works.

It comes with a lot of tweaks and super many small additions that just make your life easier, especially for gaming.

Updates just happen in the background when there’s nothing better to do and get applied to the next boot image. And in case something doesn’t work as expected, you can always go back in time.

You can also customise it almost/ just as much as regular distros, but it isn’t quite as easy if you want to customise A LOT (e.g. using TWMs).

I didn’t notice huge performance boosts tho, it just comes with more tools ootb, for example to make your GPU more silent when idle.

As said, Bazzite is based on Fedora, so you always get new great modern stuff, at the same time as the other Fedora users do.

Can 100% recommend.

The only difference between -deck and the classic one is the default environment it bolts into.

With -deck, you boot into the Steam big picture mode, and with the normal variant into normal KDE.

If you chose -deck, you can still enter desktop mode by clicking the power menu and then “Exit to desktop”.

For the beginning, I would recommend you to stick to a more popular Distro, like Mint, Fedora, Debian, and therelike.

Many niche distros, like CachyOS, are more tailored towards advanced users who know what they’re up to, or for special use cases, like TailsOS for extreme privacy (e.g. buying drugs, journalism, etc., it’s also commonly installed on an USB stick for portability and non-persistency).

With Fedora or Mint you get way more community support and resources in case something doesn’t work as expected for you, which it certainly will some time.

They’re also (mostly) identical performance wise.

For gaming, I would recommend you Bazzite, which gives you a first class gaming experience, and is extremely robust due to it being a completely new kind of distro. It also has the Nvidia-drivers already baked in if chosen, which makes it more reliable.

But regular Fedora (especially the KDE spin) or other common distros are perfectly fine too for that.

I’ve had this happen more often than I’d like to admit.

There were quite a few instances where I just couldn’t game in the evening after turning on my PC, mostly because of my power supply (outages while updating, unstable grid, damaged PSU and hard drive, etc.) and my ability to shoot myself in the foot in regards to my IT skills.

I imagined spending my friday evening differently than chrooting my install from another USB more often than I’d like to admit. At least Linux is repairable, good luck trying that with Windows…

Now, thankfully, I live in another house with a landlord that actually cares that I don’t get electrocuted in my shower, and I don’t have those problems anymore. I also don’t tinker as much with my OS anymore, at least not much.

Still, Fedora Atomic feels way more robust and less buggy than regular Fedora, especially KDE. And the QoL tweaks from uBlue are great too!

Probably Bluefin-DX.

The “DX” stands for developer experience. It’s a variant of uBlue/ Fedora Atomic (Silverblue) with a lot of added programming tools like Brew, Nix, IDEs, local LLMs, and more.

You can read more about it on the website.

There’s also Aurora, which is the same, but with KDE instead of Gnome.

The dx-images are meant to be a plug-and-play solution for developers. You just install it, share your container config to your project colleagues, and go. Don’t worry about not being able to work because of a bad update or some misalignments in your package manager broke your OS. Most stuff is containerised, and if your host breaks, you can just roll back, because the system is basically powered by git.

I’m no developer, but I use the regular variant for casual purposes (no specific tasks, mostly browser) on my laptop, and Bazzite (also very similar, but gaming focused) on my desktop, and both are wonderful! They’re the most boring distro/ OS I’ve used yet, and that’s great. They’re immutable/ image based and always work reliably.

I can really recommend them for a lot of people, from ranging from IT professionals to my mum.

I totally understand your wish, absolutely valid. From what I know Mint supports secure boot.

There aren’t many things that prevent that, but one might be the Nvidia driver. Were you able to boot into Mint and install it or similar things? Or did you just get greeted by the error message?

Maybe try downloading the image again and reflash it with another tool (e.g. Fedora Media Writer instead of Etcher) on another USB if you have one. It might be totally possible that your .iso did get corrupted in the process. And then do the whole process again.

I believe I had something similar a long time ago when I aborted the download and then resumed it, or when I pulled the USB too quickly without safely ejecting it beforehand.

I don’t use Mint, but secure boot is something that usually works by default on most distros.

Afaik, secure boot won’t increase the security as much as you think.

Did you try to reinstall it? From what you’ve written, you have some trouble with booting it. Maybe you selected some wrong partition schemes? The best one would be to select “Wipe whole drive and install”.

Did you disable secure boot, install it, and the enable it again? If yes, don’t. Boot your ISO from the USB with secure boot enabled and install it from there.

Btw, if you worry about security, then also consider also enabling full disk encryption, or at least the encryption of /home/

I wanted to add my own comment first, but yours covers it very well.

OP will be very happy with KDE and its’ app ecosystem.

About distro choice, it doesn’t matter very much.

My top recommendation would be Fedora Atomic KDE (Bazzite or Aurora), because it “just works”, has zero maintenence, will never break, and especially on Bazzite, gives you a first class gaming experience.

Other than Bazzite/ Aurora, I can of course recommend classic Fedora KDE, because of the sane defaults and both modern and stable release schedule.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed would be great if OP wants something that’s both bleeding edge and reliable, and EndeavourOS if they like Arch with very sane defaults, but more minimal than Tumbleweed.

I have zero clue about how GTK and Qt works and how they differentiate technically, but what advantages does the porting of this program have?

What do you mean with “Operating System”?

It is most often installed as Docker container, which isn’t an OS, but just includes all dependencies to run. You still need an OS (like Debian) as host.

I also made a very similar comment, but with uBlue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin) instead.

They are still pretty vanilla, but include a big list of QoL stuff added in, like staged updates, Distrobox, a huge list gaming tweaks in Bazzite, and much more.

It’s basically stock Atomic made right!

I’ve used them for a year now, and they’re fantastic!

Just a small heads up for OP: You have to do quite a lot of (advanced) things differently from now on if you choose Atomic. Use containers (Distrobox, etc.) for everything you can, avoid installing stuff on the host if possible, etc.

Because others already suggested Arch/ EndeavourOS, I’ll be suggesting something else: Bazzite.

It’s part of the image based (“immutable”) Fedora series and is basically Fedora Kinoite, with all drivers and codecs already set up for you, self managing, with many gaming tweaks included.

It’s rock solid and basically unbreakable, while also being extremely modern and updated. On Arch, even if it doesn’t break, you always get the newest stuff, which might not be as polished. On Fedora, it matures a few months, while still being very modern.

The main target group is “For Linux users who don’t want to use Linux”, meaning, it runs all your favourite stuff (KDE, etc.) without having to care for anything. It even updates itself automatically in the background without any interference.

If you prefer something with less “bloat” (a lot of optional tools and software to choose from, but nothing mandatory), then check out Aurora, which is basically the same, but without gaming stuff.

For more information, check out universal-blue.org

Just a small heads up for OP: You have to do quite a lot of (advanced) things differently from now on if you choose Atomic.

Use containers (Distrobox, etc.) for everything you can, avoid installing stuff on the host if possible, etc.

Just use Flatpaks for 95% you do graphically, and for CLI stuff or software that isn’t available as Flatpak, I would recommend you to create an Arch Distrobox container (already set up IIRC) and use that. You can even install stuff from the AUR and export it, so it works just like it is supposed to.

Maybe, another consideration might be to not run Linux on Windows in some way, but the other way around.

Linux offers great virtualization, maybe you can use QEMU with KVM and GPU passthrough, and then run Windows inside this box.

I find Linux more powerful and less annoying to use day to day, and having those annoyances inside a small virtualized container I can just shut down is more peaceful.

WSL can be restricting, since Linux can’t access anything, and I think getting “the real and proper thing” might be better.

And dual booting, by having both Windows and Linux on the same drive, is something I would advise against. Windows doesn’t play nice with others and often “accidentally” breaks the bootloader and hard drive permissions, leading only to trouble. If you dual boot, install them on a separate drive and select the booting drive manually in the BIOS.

Also, why do you want to run Ubuntu specifically? Did you also look up for alternatives, like Fedora or Debian?

Dual booting Pros: a full-fledged Linux OS Cons: Harder to install and to mantain.

Also, sometimes Windows being an ass and “accidentally” breaking the bootloader.

I advice anyone to have just one OS per drive installed. Keep Windows and Linux separate if possible, or some Windows update may break GRUB.

The SMART didn’t help. It showed full health and no errors.

I had something similar when my drive started to fail.

At first, it was annoying, because the cursor froze all the time, just like yours, then programs started to do the same, then they started to crash without reason, and in the end, even my unbreakable OS (Fedora Atomic) broke randomy and incoherently.

What did I learn? Don’t cheap out on drives, and keep enough backups.

The only issues I had were due to fractional scaling (blurry apps, especially Electron based ones; and windows opening or moving to weird edges, where I can’t move them anymore).

But those were already a few months or a year ago, and since I switched from Gnome to KDE 6, I have zero issues, neither on my laptop (integrated on CPU), nor on my desktop with an AMD GPU.

And even over a year, almost two, ago, Wayland has been very smooth for me. I used Gnome for most of the time, which has always been very solid with Wayland. KDE has been a bit more janky in the past, but nowadays, Wayland feels way smoother and polished than X11 for me.

I use Casa"OS". It’s fine, but nothing groundbreaking. Cockpit for example can do pretty much the same, and for Docker containers, I nowadays mostly use docker compose.

But hey, it helped me a quite a bit in the beginning, and it’s cool. Pretty basic, but enough for most people, mainly beginners.