Admittedly, I’m probably not the best person to ask for recommendation of a noob-friendly distro, but I feel people are overthinking this. If someone produces a list which includes distros I’ve never heard of, I think they spent too much time on ‘Top 10 Noob Friendly Distros in 2025’ websites.

If you really care about my recommendation, just start with Mint.

PS. I should also add, this isn’t criticism of you or any other new user who does search online for recommendation. This is more a comment on state of the Internet where there are so many websites which seem to pad their list with obscure distros where really all such articles should give recommendation for one of the same three distributions. Which three I don’t exactly know.

deleted by creator

I would personally recommend popos or mint. I have varying amount of experience with the others.

Bazzite is very hyped on Lemmy, I don’t quite understand how it works, it seems good for what it is, but I don’t know if I would recommend it as someone’s first Linux daily driver.

Manjaro seems great most of the time, until the maintainers mess something up and royally screw up your system. But that’s just things I’ve heard, your milage will vary.

Nobara worked really well for me, but ultimately I wasn’t very comfortable to use a distro maintained by one guy, even if that guy is glorious egg roll.

I personally use popos. I wish it was fedora based like Nobara, but you can’t have it all. Wow works straight out the box. There are appimages or deb packages for warcraft logs and curse as well, so they work fine.

First, gaming distros are vanilla distros with opinionated tweaks and additions to support the hobby of gaming. It might be as simple as having Steam pre-installed to as complex as having unique kernels or custom package repos maintained by the distro maintainers.

But that doesn’t mean vanilla is always the best choice, because not everybody wants to spend time optimizing everything. Some distros even have easy setup scripts for otherwise complex installations (like for Davinci Resolve). Don’t feel like you need to pick vanilla to be a “true user.”

Some easy to set up Distros for gaming that are ready ootb:

• Bazzite: Fedora Atomic, practically bulletproof, just works. Downsides are that adding new packages is not the same as other distros, and there’s a learning curve to it beyond flatpaks. Some software can’t be installed at all if it doesn’t come as an RPM or AppImage (Private Internet Access’s VPN client, for example).

• CachyOS: Arch with an optimized kernel and optimized packages. Comes with some easy-install scripts. Tool to easily select different kernels and schedulers. Currently another very popular choice. Like the above, this just works. There’s some debate about how significant the optimizations really are, but they’re there nonetheless.

• Nobara: Traditional Fedora. Like Bazzite, just works. Has a custom update manager that acts as a GUI wrapper for your usual cli tools. Maintained by GloriousEggroll, a widely respected user that maintains the GE versions of Proton.

• PikaOS: Debian (not Ubuntu). Combines the philosophies of Nobara and CachyOS and puts them atop Debian. Better setup scripts than even CachyOS, a more user friendly update tool than Nobara’s, and has the same kernel selection and scheduler tools as CachyOS, plus the same package optimizations. Don’t let the fact that it’s Debian underneath fool you. This has the latest kernel and drivers.

I would try all of those in a VM and see what you like about them. They’re all unique and worth a look.

ETA: all of these have Nvidia versions, so all of them should work with your card.