Nice list, though I would remove Manjaro from that. Manjaro is far from stable, they just delay Arch packages without even testing and it will bork itself in no time or will cause some problems at least.

Anyway, I see you have included Fedora based, so I would like to suggest OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I installed it on my sister's PC and she's been happily using it for some time now. Previously she borked Manjaro and brake updates on Pop OS just by using the system via GUI. That didn't happen on Tumbleweed yet and I don't think it will. Even if something would happen, she can revert everything by selecting a recovery image from GRUB and continue using it.

I'm not sure what performance improvements you're talking about. As far as I'm aware, the difference between distros on performance is extremely minimal. What does matter is how up to date the DE is in the distribution provided package. For example, I wanted some nvidia+Wayland improvements that were only in kwin 6.1, and so I switched from kubuntu to neon in order to get them (and also definitely sacrificed some stability since more broken packages/combinations get pushed to users than in base ubuntu). It's also possible that the kernel version might matter in some cases, but I haven't run into this personally.

I think the main differences between distros is how apps are packaged and the defaults provided, and if you're most comfortable with apt based systems, I'm not sure what benefit there's going to be to switching (other than the joy in tinkering and learning something new, which can be fun in its own right).

For some users less experienced with linux, the initial effort required to setup Ubuntu for gaming (installing graphics drivers/possibly setting kernel options, etc) might push someone toward a distribution that removes that barrier, but the end state is going to be basically identical to whatever you've setup yourself.

The choice between distributions is probably more 'what do I want the process to getting to my desired end state to be like' and less 'how do I want the computer to run'.

My recommendation would be setting up Nobara with a separate home partition so you can easily switch if it stops being supported, although there are no sign of this yet. My second recommendation would be Opensuse Leap, it is more stable and well established but less optimized for gaming. Maybe take another look at Pop OS! when they release their independent new desktop. If you go with base Fedora be aware setting up codecs can be annoying. Avoid Manjaro, the distro breaks a lot due to dependency conflicts. Also I think you mean GNOME 40, GNOME 3 is the old design.

Nice write up, seems like you know what you are jumping into atleast. Personally would recommend to give Bazzite a try and not rule out immutables too quickly, nothing is more solid than these variants. If not immutable, then my best experience lies with Opensuse TW by far. Super stable, yet bleeding edge.

For gaming you want the latest updates. Of all the major distros, only Arch, Suse and Fedora provide that. Arch requires you to learn to about and fix breakage. Fedora has a gaming spin which works like a Steam Deck: Bazzite.

I've distro hopped between 10+ distros, and Bazzite has been the only one that gave me a rock solid stability and latest drivers simultaneously. It's not purely immutable, Fedora calls it Atomic.

I suggest you try it, and tell me if there was anything you couldn't do.

Also: I don't support Canonical's walled garden

Regarding your not wanting to go with an immutable distro: what configs are you thinking you'll need to mess with that makes an immutable distro a bad idea exactly? I was previously on the fence about it as well but Bazzite has absolutely served my needs and requires way less fiddling than my previous Nobara install did after major updates. I have yet to find any day to day configurations that I haven't been able to overcome with OSTree overlaying. Aside from being immutable, Bazzite literally checks every other box you've got listed.

+1 for Fedora KDE. I've been daily driving it for 2 years now and its given me very little problems. I stopped using Windows about 5 years ago now and haven't looked back, and after distro hopping for a bit, I'm pretty satisfied with my experience with Fedora. Initial setup can take a little bit because theres some repos you need to add/enable to get nonfree software (including video/audio codecs that basically every website ever uses), but once you do that its pretty solid. You get pretty up-to-date software without it being so new that things break after every other update. It strikes a nice balance.

However, if you're familiar and comfortable with Ubuntu, you'll likely be just fine sticking with that. You probably won't notice huge performance differences between distros. It sounds like the bigger concern is if you're safe to just nuke Windows and I'm not going to be the one to discourage you from doing that. Up to you if you want to try something new or not.

Manjaro

I highly recommend avoiding manjaro like the plague, their team is incredibly incompetent (see: https://manjarno.pages.dev/ ), I say this as someone who has given people manjaro for years and regretted it, I was also their it person, manjaro regularly broke every few months and gave people a very bad taste of linux

for example, why are kernels given version numbers in packages? This caused 3 separate peoples computers to break multiple times. Everything good about manjaro comes from arch, everything bad about manjaro comes from the manjaro team.

Y’know how it’s not rolling release because they delay packages by 2 weeks? They actually do no testing in this time. How do I know this? They pushed an update that caused steam to uninstall your desktop environment. Famously covered by linus tech tips… this is something that should have easily been caught, and yet the two week window did absolutely nothing.

the truth is for manjaro there is no real usecase, there’s no set of desires that align with manjaro being the best choice for you. I am not asking you to switch away from manjaro, but I do not think we should ever recommend it to anyone, and on your next machine, I recommend trying the arch installer.

But if what you’re looking for is an easy pre-setup arch, use endeavoros

If you want something simple and up to date, use fedora kinoite

If you’re a power user and want to configure every little thing about their system, use arch or nixos

If you don’t care at all about updates and want the most rock solid system possible, debian.

I see mostly Tumbleweed on protondb. I myself am on my 4th attempted transition and keep borking my system. So take my input with a bucket of salt but its making me think of trying it.

Nobara is nice.

I might have missed it, but why isn't Mint on there? From what I read on your list of requirements, it fits in. I will say this, Mint with the Cinnamon desktop has become my workhorse distro of choice.

It's the most stable and no-fuss distro I've used, and I've tried many.

That being said, I personally use Nobara for my gaming PC and it's been really good. It's not as stable though, and that is partially my fault, I'm a tinkerer on that system. Part of it is KDE Plasma though, especially on Wayland.

Don't get me wrong, it still works great and plays everything super well! But there are several little annoyances that happen. Menus not popping up in the right place. Windows sometimes opening completely off screen so I have to manually drag them back into view, some recent flickering with certain games in the menus. Once every 4-6 weeks, my mouse will stop responding when I unlock the PC., and I have to unplug and re-plug it in.

Again, nothing game-breaking or super frustrating, just little annoyances. Comes with the territory of tweaking your systems and using newer tech like Wayland.

If you like Kubuntu and it's been working well for you, stick with it, it's a solid Ubuntu spin for sure. Don't fall into the grass-is-greener trap.

Sounds like you're ready to join the ~~cult~~ club of Debian.

It's stable, performant, and adaptable. Tons of window manager options. And I've found that anything I like from *buntu distros I can backport into Debian by finding a .deb file.

I just started using Bazzite. It's my second attempt at a Linux gaming setup (Pop_OS was first, Bazzite is working out much better).

What made you lean away from Bazzite, if you don't mind expanding on that?

A bit off topic, but I have been using Arch for over a decade now, and it has been pretty stable for me. My only issue in last few years were if my kernel got updated which needed updated nvidia driver, and I rebooted before noticing that. (Very old laptop, so nvidia drivers for this aren't in repos, hence the issue). I didn't use it for gaming though (very old laptop, wouldn't even run old games)

BTW I recently went the opposite way, have been using only Linux for over a decade but got a new laptop a month back and kept the windows as a dual boot, though my main interest is to use it only for MS/Xbox first party games, that don't have Linux support. Saving me from buying a separate Xbox.

My advice is: make your data eternal, not your distro. Your kde config and customization should work across distros (but don't dualboot with 2 distros messing in the same /home). Don't know about you, but I like the separated work/play dynamic I have with linux/windows so I'm waiting for bazzite to become dual bootable with linux to be my playstation. If you put your game library on it's own partition/disk you can mount it from dualboot distros.

Every distribution is always the most stabellest, maintained piece of software on their website but fuckups happen, teams change, users get blamed for exotic circumstances tarnishing their reputation. Have a backup and use whatever feels right currently.

Pop_os is also ubuntu based btw, hate the name but maybe system76 is able to keep you safe from the snappification while you use what you are accustumed to?

Linux newbie here, so this information may be for other newbies. I tried Nobara when I had problems with my Manjaro. But Nobara fresh out the box had some problems and it being a "one person project" kinda bugged me. Also not having the AUR(Arch User Repository) anymore was making me try Endeavour OS.

Manjaro is pretty good, but Endeavour OS has better Nvidia integration, also it comes with yay and other quality of life stuff already setup. Better for a noob like me.

Oh, I also tried Fedora KDE but at that point I was hooked to Arch. It is just so much easier to install programs from AUR with the terminal than what other distros try with "app-stores"

Garuda has been an A+ gaming distro for me so far, been daily driving it for about 6 months.

https://garudalinux.org/

Re the flatpak issue, what you linked is just saying that flatpak won't be a default installed program and packages provided by flatpaks won't be officially supported by Ubuntu support as of 23.03. I don't think this effects your use of Ubuntu in any way. If you want to use flatpaks, just install the program. It will still be packaged in the Ubuntu repositories. 23.04 was over a year ago. I still use flatpak without a problem on my kubuntu 24.04 system. It's just a one time thing to do sudo apt-get install flatpak and maybe a second package for KDE's flatpak packagekit back end and it's like canonical never made that decision.

The push of snaps instead of debs is a bit more concerning because it removes the deb as an option in the official repositories. But as of right now I think only Mozilla software has this happening? If your timeline is 5-10 years though, this may be more of an issue depending on how hard canonical pushes snaps and how large their downsides remain

This might not help, but I'd seriously recommend reconsidering Arch derivatives.

I've been 100% Linux for almost 2 years now, with Garuda Linux on my primary desktop and Fedora on my laptop. I've had zero major issues with Garuda (and very few minor ones, to the point I can't think of any specific problems in the moment), gaming performance has been fantastic, and the availability of software in the AUR is nothing short of amazing.

In my experience, keeping up with updates is not at all an impediment to use, and I've yet to have stability issues of any kind. I've been seriously considering replacing Fedora with Garuda on my laptop, the experience has been so smooth.

Just stay away from Manjaro. I feel like Arch fan-boys being dicks and people recommending Manjaro to new Linux converts are the only two problems with Arch (or at least its derivite distros, I haven't raw dogged vanilla Arch before).

Since your main priority is stability, I'd suggest either Debian Stable or Mint. Debian Stable is rock solid, but the software is ancient; Mint is a good compromise. They both have a nice package selection.

The reason why I don't recommend Ubuntu itself is snaps. Huge downloads with lots of wasted disk space, wasted memory, less user control, mismatching themes, larger loading times... urgh.

Desktop environment is such a personal matter that it's hard to say which one would be the best for you. I'm a big fan of MATE - it's small, it's nice, you can reasonably customise it without new extensions or applets. Xfce would be also a good performance-focused choice.

I've been thinking the same thing lately, and based on my recent Linux usage on my other machines, I would probably pick something Fedora based with KDE. I've been using Arch on my "work" laptop and it's been really fine and fun, but also a LOT of work (especially when I break something myself). Having a ton of very up to date packages to install, plus the AUR and Flatpaks to shore up anything that might be missing makes for a very "compatible" system. And of course, the freedom and courage to set it up just exactly the way I want.

I used Linux Mint for several years, it's the one I can say I'm most comfortable with. If I had to set up another low power laptop or a computer for a family member I'd either use that or MX Linux. They just don't break. I have also tried Fedora for a short time, and it made me start liking KDE Plasma, and it was honestly the easiest one to set up for Steam out of the box. And it had more in variety and more up to date packages than Mint, and also easily augmentable with Flatpaks for what's missing. OpenSUSE was similar, but the package manager was excruciatingly slow, and there were no good mirrors for fast downloads, dropped that very quickly.

Although, overall from your past experience in the post and other responses in the thread, I think you'll do just fine with Kubuntu. You're already plenty familiar with how to use it and how to set it up the way you need it to. I've been considering Nobara for my gaming PC as basically a better Fedora, but I'm afraid of projects with so few people taking care of them fizzling out in a couple years, and it's not as simple as just replacing it with base Fedora if that happens. So yeah, my personal choices would be Arch, Mint or Fedora. But my case is not the same as yours.

I have been using Linux forever. I've used Red hat, SUSE, Debian, Slackware, Mandrake, Ubuntu and now Arch with KDE. Part of the fun is trying different distros.

I've currently settled with vanilla Arch with KDE (Gnome get it together) and a bunch of flatpaks for user software stuff. I really like rolling releases these days. Just keep the core install minimal and tight.

Also the Arch forum community is top notch.

With that said I would start with package manager and desktop GUI you like and then go from there.