People have made distro recomendations already, so I want to talk a bit about what makes a distro a distro: application repositories and management, update cadence, and what’s installed by default. That’s pretty much it. Anything else can likely be transplanted from distro to distro.

Out of the default applications by far the most important is the desktop environment. Have a look at Gnome, KDE (and others, cinnamon, etc.). Pick something you like the look of. Gnome is known to be closer to Mac styling and sentiments, including the our-way-or-the-highway philosophy, limited customisability in the name of consistency, etc… KDE is the ‘we heard you like customisation so we put customisations on your customisations’ kind of environment.

Update cadence really boils down to one of two things - do you want a new OS version every few months where the distro maintainers manually release a bunch of software all tested together (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora), or do you want each application released individually after it’s been tested to work with everything else (Arch)? Note that the former are sometimes called ‘stable’ releases but not because they are less likely to crash, but because there are simply fewer updates. The latter are called ‘rolling’ releases.

The application management philosophies are a lot harder to nail down, especially as a newbie. You will probably just have to accept that the first distro you try will likely not be the one you settle on. For instance I started with Ubuntu until I got fed up how difficult it was to install anything not found in the main repository (a surprising amount of software): In Debian-based distros (like Ubuntu) unofficial software is fragmented across thousands of ‘personal’ repositories that you must manually add URLs and signing keys for, it feels very clunky. Because they are personal respositories it’s easy for the owner to abandon it or just not push updates and you won’t even notice until it breaks after a system update. Once I had some Linux experience under my belt I found the Arch repository style much easier to work with: One central official repository, and one ‘unofficial’ repository. I’ve heard Fedora has a similar system.

But the single most important piece of advice - just pick something. The great thing about Linux is it makes hopping distros easy: A package manager makes it trivial to export a list of installed programs so you can reinstall them on your next distro. You won’t be enslaved to a distro once you decide, so just pick something and use it for a bit. Learn what you like and what you don’t. Use that to decide on your next pick.

When choosing your first distro it’s probably best to go with one that is very popular - Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mint, etc. Niche distros are a surefire path to immediate troubleshooting.

From there, decide what desktop environment you want. Most distros offer releases with various environments (KDE, Gnome).

There are differences with package managers… who cares, you either run this command or that one to update.

I second using a Live USB to run any distro release first so you can test drive it. If you use Ventoy on your USB drive you can put multiple distro ISOs on it instead of having to flash only one at a time.

If you have a computer background already then dive in! For a gaming rig try PopOS or Nobara.

PopOS is Ubuntu based and used Gnome. They’re hard at work on a new custom DE that appears Gnome-like. PopOS is made by hardware company System76 to improve upon Ubuntu’s support of newer hardware they wish to sell.

Nobara is Fedora based and recently switched to KDE Plasma which aligns with the Steam Deck. Nobara is specifically tweaked for gaming.

I’d add my ballot in to recommend Mint or Pop! for someone who wants to game. Newer WINE and Proton versions have made gaming so very nice on Linux. Cinnamon, Mate, and XFCE environments are what I’d recommend for your graphical shell. Cinnamon is kinda Mint’s flagship DE. I’d recommend it for anyone new to Linux or even new to computers in general.

I spent many, many years administering Suse and RHEL systems for work. I found that while I was more comfortable with configuring Red Hat/Fedora-style systems from a terminal/shell-only POV, Mint+Cinnamon were what made Desktop Linux work for me when I realized I absolutely was not going from Win 7 to Win 10. I feel like it’s only gotten better since.

I currently use Endeavour + Cinnamon, but Endeavour is Arch-based, and more for tinkering with than ‘Install and it just werks’ the way Mint or Pop! are.

I just want to know if there’s any convenient tips or tricks to make the transition easier.

dualboot, i always recomend that, you gonna break your distro while learning and that’s good, but you still uses windows, and need a funcional system, so keep the dual boot while you’re learning

about what distro, you need to test, and because you have a background in unix and macos it isn’t gonna be as hard for you, distro hopping is normal

for me as someone who does not want to setup much I like zorin. Out of box it emulates the look and feel of windows and has all sorts of applications pre installed including wine/play on linux. its the most install and go distro I have used,