IMHO Linux Mint keeps being the strongest option to recommend when the intention is a clean transition with the least amount of fiddling. It just works, it is reliable, and it doesn't play games with changes of basic technologies that can only cause confusion (e.g. none of the Ubuntu shenanigans like their confusing desktop or their non-Debian packaging)
I can't agree about the "it just works" part. About a year ago I build a new PC, and I tried installing Mint on it. I ran into two issues that I was never able to resolve:
1. The WiFi just would not work; I couldn't see any networks.
2. I have 2 monitors, and one monitor would display 80% of one screen, and 20% of the other. I suspect that it was because the monitors had different refresh rates and resolutions.
I then tried installing Windows, and everything did just work.
I wouldn't recommend Mint. Better use something with recent KDE Plasma and recent kernel and Mesa for best Wayland experience.
Especially speaking of playing games, I periodically see newcomer Linux gamers hitting problems due to Mint being outdated and not having good Wayland support. Especially for any kind of recent hardware.
Fedora makes major upgrades pretty easy - you can even do it via the GUI Software Center, then reboot.
Personally I'm using Kinoite[1], an "immutable" version of Fedora that has an immutable base image, which makes it nearly impossible to break things during updates (even major upgrades).
You probably used Nvidia and some outdated distro with a bad DE on top. Not something you should be using. Using X11 is DOA anyway, so you can figure out what was wrong in your case and use better options.
No, AMD. I had issues on the latest Debian, released this summer, with KDE. X11 works perfectly fine. I would be happy with wayland too, if it worked. And in fact I use it on my other device.
The Steam main window did not open, although Steam itself did load in the background. I could work around this by disabling smooth scrolling on web view and some other GPU-related option (I forgot exactly).
But then there was a strange glitch on every single game (both native and Proton-based). Periodically (e.g. every ~10 seconds on some 3D games, on every screen reload on some other) the screen turned black for about 2 seconds.
Then I remembered that I had some issue when I first installed Debian 12 two years, though I forgot which issues exactly, and that I solved them by switching from Wayland to X11.
What DE? And that's with all the latest components as above? I wouldn't use Debian stable for gaming purposes, since it falls behind very quickly. Debian testing / unstable is a better idea, and even then you'd want to install latest amdgpu firmware manually potentially.
Linux Mint is terrible. Horribly outdated software, how are they still on X11? Both their DEs are forks which introduces problems...
Like, in regular Gnome/KDE land, you have Wayland which is a huge improvement over X11, HDR works, fractional scaling works... None of that works on Mint.
Not sure why you are downvoted, what you said is true. Mint has some WIP to support Wayland in Cinnamon, but it's way behind other DEs and I wouldn't recommend using it.
Wong wording may be, but the point of the post is correct. Mint just lags behind with Wayland support and in being up to date for handling recent hardware especially.
The former is Mint's specific problem, while the latter is a general problem of all long period release distros that don't take care of updating Linux kernel, Mesa and etc. to actual recent releases.
