Linux

I just installed Nobara in a similar setup for similar reasons a few days ago after having several bad experiences with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint. I wanted to move away from Ubuntu-based distros and Nobara seems like it's focused on gaming (frequent updates, etc). It's been.. I dunno if great is the right word, but pretty good. I run into difficulties of some variety with almost everything I do (can't install battle.net in lutris because it hangs at 45%, lutris can't log into epic games store, etc), but I've also found solutions for them without too much trouble and the games that I have managed to install run great.

Fedora

I’m a big fan of Elementary OS, it’s likely the most user friendly desktop, easy to use and plenty of advanced features, such as thoughtful options to make the interface usable by everyone.

https://getaurora.dev/en

It’s 2025, if you’ve got the space to dual boot, you’ve got space for snapshots. There’s no reason not to set them up. Btrfs, ZFS, LVM, pick your poison. Disk is cheap, your time isn't.

And if “simple stuff” is breaking your system, that tells me three things:

1. You’re still using apt-get instead of apt

2. You’re ignoring dependency warnings

3. You’re probably not fully understanding the commands you’re running — so RTFM

So yeah, I will be telling you to use Mint, with at LEAST daily snapshots.

MX Linux

ZorinOS maybe ?

Bazzite is great for gaming !

Nobara too.

Try Void Linux. It's awesome.

theres a new one made by a microsoft enginer as a hobby project called Anduin OS it is very simmilar to windows based on ubuntu it can be downloaded at https://www.anduinos.com/ and a video by mental outlaw can be found at https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=bQAUFgS657w i personally never tried it and it is a hobby project but it looks promising

Fedora or UwUntu.

I used Mint on my previous system but currently rolling CachyOS personally. Bazzite was a close contender for me.

If you get to the point where you decide you want a distro that is not immutable, try Garuda, it's where I went after Bazzite. It is also gaming focused and has a great helper app to install most of the things most people need and do updates.

Should be popular distro so if i have a problem i can ask about it

I mean, Arch has the Arch Wiki which is very good. (I use Arch, btw.) 😸

I'm surprised Mint is giving you trouble. Where you doing something... risky? Or maybe the hardware you're running isn't very compatible?

Otherwise, a distro like VanillaOS (or any immutable distro) might be able to keep your system more stable.

The age old question. You have to understand that Linux the kernel is made in such a way that anything built on top of it will always require way too much from the user. It feels like something made from programmers for programmers, just like how UNIX was designed. No distro will be able to change that. Windows is packed with bandaids to make it behave closer to what users expect, but anything that comes from UNIX has it's focus in making the code nice, not making ordinary users happy necessarily.

So picking a distro is entirely a choice on how you wanna interact with the kernel's interfaces, but they're still the same interfaces. No pretty UI will change that.

Just make sure that the distro you choose has a mature community behind it and that packages are being actively maintained. Make sure that if you file a bug report it will get some attention. That's the only thing you should care about in a distro, everything else is flashy nonsense.

Edit: Also as you can see by the replies to my comment, Linux is kind of a cult, so beware of that.

Just note that is you really need a safe place, having Windows installed on the same machine is counter productive. Make sure you encrypt your Linux partitions. Otherwise it's very easy to mount them and sniff all the things from Windows.