Whatever you use, so when he asks for support, you're in a position to help
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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The second question is easier: I'm way more opinionated about preferring KDE than I am about which distro to use.
likely You'll be supporting them, so whatever you're more comfortable trouble shooting
I would recommend Linux Mint. Its really simple to work with and basically plug and play. Comes with a solid software selection and built in tools. I personally really like the cinammon and mate editions. Cinnamon has a bit more modern look to it and MATE is a bit more retro.
I heard that Linux Mint doesn't play nice with newer hardware? Or is that only an Nvidia thing
It has to do with LTS kernel (iirc) making it incompatible with certain new(er) hardware. I recommend Fedora KDE.
Mint is based on Ubuntu, which has a Hardware Enablement Stack offering newer kernels. I would expect that (or maybe something Mint-specific) to take care of it.
I still would never recommend a "stable release" or LTS distro because the vast majority of security vulnerabilities never receive a CVE, and as a result the a large amount of vulnerabilities go unpatched for months. Also I like distros that take security seriously (Fedora and openSUSE).
Usually they backport security fixes to the stable version.
As I mentioned, most security vulnerabilities are not reported because it may not seem security related. The distro maintainers can't keep up with every package and read all the commits, so as a result security fixes often go unfocused. It is a real big problem that many security researchers acknowledged.
I ran an older Nvidia card an currently a new amd card on Linux mint without problems. I suggest you try it out first using a live install on a USB stick.
It also doesn't have HDR if that's important to you. I switch into kubuntu whenever I want to watch something in HDR.
Anything Ubuntu-based (and thus Debian-based) may not be the best choice for brand new hardware, as it takes a bit longer for all the drivers to make it into the kernel.
My husband is using the non-LTS version of Ubuntu 25.10 with a 9060XT and has driver support and is happy with it. Mint would not support his card at this time according to our research. Bazzite was just a disaster for him -- lots of issues with not sleeping and the immutable distro made it hard to do what he wanted since he uses spinning hard drives for storage and wanted them to automount as well as managing a huge music library housed on a NAS. I think some of the issues were with his older B450 motherboard despite having updated the bios to the latest stable version. I am on older hardware and love Mint. I feel at home on the Debian-based distros though. Depends on your use case and how much you're willing to learn. Protip: Before you leave your friend alone with the system, make sure that it will do normal system things properly -- enter sleep, wake from sleep, reboot, etc since these are the things that will drive an average person insane when they don't function correctly.
Will do that.
I had to use an AMD provided script to get Mint to work with my ryzen AI 9 370, as the system couldn't drive the built in graphics
First boot had to happen with the "nomodeset" ( no [graphics] mode set[ting]) or it couldn't do any graphics, the screen went black as soon as it got out of the initial text mode
So no, Mint isn't great with very new equipment
Fedora if he's not gaming.
Bazzite if he's gaming. Or CachyOS.
I'll give you the secret to easy linux: stick with defaults! Stick with distros aimed at whatever you're tying to do, and you get a whole army of very experienced developers preconfiguring it all for you, for free. Instead of having to maintain breakage youself.
For example, do you want to learn all about debugging AMD drivers? Do you want to get into the intricacies of performant Proton setups, and environment variables, and kernels stuff?
You could just not, and get all that prepackaged!
Here's just a sampling of some pre-configured stuff in my distro:
cachyos/protonplus 0.5.14-1
A simple Wine and Proton-based compatiblity tools manager for GNOME
cachyos/protontricks 1.13.1-1
Run Winetricks commands for Steam Play/Proton games among other common Wine features
cachyos/protonup-qt 2.14.0-1
Install and manage Proton-GE and Luxtorpeda for Steam and Wine-GE for Lutris
cachyos/umu-launcher 1.3.0-2
This is the Unified Launcher for Windows Games on Linux, to run Proton with fixes outside of Steam
cachyos/vkd3d-proton-mingw-git 3.0.r0.g6d97b022-1
Fork of VKD3D. Development branches for Protons Direct3D 12 implementation
cachyos-znver4/mesa-git 26.0.0_devel.216300.02cfc61cc93-1
an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification, git version
Do I know a thing about how Proton works? Nope. Do I know anything about maintaining an upstream AMD driver for some kind of bug fix? Absolutely not. And I don't have to! It's just there, in sync with the rest of my system through some maintainer's magic.
Fedora if he's not gaming.
Bazzite if he's gaming. Or CachyOS.
Specs are a 9800X3D and a 9070XT. He's definitely gaming.
Or if he isn't, he bought the wrong computer.
I'd do CachyOS. It's a very new GPU. They even have packages specifically optimized for that CPU, and fixing stuff (other than simply rolling back) isn't such a pain.
But I'm biased, as I like CachyOS.
Fedora is perfect for beginners. Stay away from immutable anything if you're going to be helping support this.
I guess I will install Fedora for him then. What's wrong with the atomic distros?
Lots of extra hoops. Not enough documentation or community for a beginner to get support.
fair enough
No matter what you end up using, make sure he installs RustDesk, so you can easily connect and fix the inevitable problems
Bazzite works pretty well out of the box and with new hardware (n = 1)
Ok, but I would kind of find flatpaks very restrictive after a while.
Then you have graduated from being a newb and can choose your own distro.
Depends. Why does he want to use Linux?
Because he heard that Windows 11 is very stinky, and Windows 10 is no longer supported.
And what does he want to use it to do?
Regular Fedora should be perfectly fine. I'd ensure a separate /home partition and a backup for ease of reinstallation if it gets wrecked. Yes, an atomic distro or btrfs snapshots could do that too, but like you mentioned, there are other considerations for atomic distros. And a separate /home partition eases installation of other distros if Fedora doesn't do it for him for some reason.
He will be doing some gaming (mostly single player stuff, like Minecraft) and will also be doing your normal everyday stuff (schoolwork, internet things, and probably a bit of programming since he is doing CS)
Coming from windows, Linux mint cinnamon will be very familiar to him. It also runs games well, being based on Ubuntu.
Actually, he isn't coming from Windows. He only has an iPad, I think this is his first PC
I vote Fedora as well, I love it having come from windows myself about a year ago. Not a big gamer anymore, but can confirm Minecraft runs well on Fedora KDE Plasma and looks similar to windows. I am a homelabber by hobby and an electrical engineer by trade. I do a bit of light CS and networking/SCADA for in my job. Understanding Unix-based systems is helpful for both realms. If your friend is a CS student and doesn’t have a PC already as a daily driver, this is THE time to get into Linux in my opinion since they are a blank canvas. I’m of the opinion knowing Unix-based systems, like Linux is only going to help you later in your career so might as well learn it now. Haha
Yep Fedora is great, it's what I run too. I'm going with that then.
Based on what I've heard about Bazzite I'd pick it over Fedora for your friend, but I've always used Debian-based distros so I can't speak from experience.
For new users, I've been recommending Zorin with good success.
would an ubuntu base support something as new as a 9800 well?
I'm sure it'd be fine.
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Is your friend a beginner? If so, Mint or Pop_OS! should be considered, since they're both Ubuntu-based. Bazzite is not recommended due to its atomic nature being kinda wonky, and Fedora I wouldn't recommend due to IBM being a bunch of stubborn bums about antiquated technology (i.e. X11) that works fine, compared to newer stuff (i.e. Wayland) which is not ready for prime time at all.
If he isn't, and knows what he's doing, CachyOS is a good choice, but I'd recommend he use Cinnamon as his DE, since it looks similar to Windows Vista or Windows 7. It does have both X11 and Wayland, but it's X11 by default.
Agree except Bazzite is good for the right kind of non-technical person if they have someone setting it up. PopOs is the safe choice though.
Pop OS has always been slow for me, I don't know why.
I’m using OST right now and I like it’s features quite a lot
My PC is the same build and I run Kinoite (also KDE). The only major issue I ran into was figuring out how to get a Windows VM up and running for work stuff, but I eventually got it and now that's working smoothly, too.
The majority of what most people run is available as a Flatpak container, but there's also rpm-ostree if you want to install packages, which functions similarly to dnf. And you still have rpm if you want to install something manually.
As far as AMD driver support goes, everything's been working great. Can't say how it compares to base Fedora, though, but it's probably similar.
The Bazzite docs really recommend against rpm-ostree, saying it could break stuff and such
I don't use it as a primary, but for me it's been fine for some one-off tools.
Arch.
The most unpopular here is Ubuntu. It is however very stable and has flatpak like things called snaps that everyone hates because its not called flatpak.
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