I recommend you Aurora. It is basically Bazzite, which you already suggested, but without gaming stuff.

Why do I recommend you that?

• The auto updates are amazing. Don’t disable them. It isn’t like on Windows, where it just randomly says “Updating, please don’t shut down your PC” midst working. They get just staged, so they are only applied passively on the next boot. You don’t notice them.
• Rollbacks: If an update introduced breaking bugs or whatever, you can just keep holding the space bar while booting, and you can select the image from yesterday. Everything is left how it was yesterday. You probably never have to use that feature anyway, the system is super reliable.
• The release schedule. This one is the most important aspect for your case. uBlue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin, etc.) started offering different variants/ tags if the same image. There’s now a GTS variant around, which uses the last big release of Fedora, which is still kept up to date maintenance wise. So, you are always half a year behind in terms of new features, but it has been tested for half a year more than regular Fedora or the other images. When you choose the more conservative GTS variant, you’ll get way fewer surprises.

After installation, you can hop into the terminal and use the ujust rebase-helper, where you can select which image variant you want to have

• latest: synchronous with Fedora
• stable (default): features are two weeks behind
• gts: already said, last release, but still secure and more polished.

I think it is the perfect balance for you between “Debian is too stale” and “Fedora and many other distros change too often”.

Fedora Atomic, especially Bluefin, Bazzite and Aurora.

Nearly unbreakable, very reliable and stable in everyday use, needs no maintenance (updates itself, etc.) and more!

I chose to continue with my current setup until I get the time and motivation to upgrade.

I will build a new server from scratch. For that, I bought an used mainboard for a few bucks, which has 6 SATA slots.

You won’t need any additional driver, since, as you already said, it is already included in the kernel.

However, as owner of a RX6600, I can tell you that the GPU will be quite loud sometimes. I can recommend you to check out LACT, which let’s you define fan curves, which makes it A LOT less noisy.

Your case sounds like a perfect fit for Bazzite or Aurora.

• Both come already set up ootb, with all quality of life tweaks you want and need.
• They are image based distros (“immutable”), so you mainly work in your /var/ and /home/ directory, and all the other stuff is untouched and clean.
• They are very modern, getting the same updates at the same time as upstream Fedora.
• Running Ollama is just one ujust command away, many complex things are made easier with those commands
• You probably won’t get a lot more performance I believe. At least when I switched from regular Fedora/ Silverblue to Bazzite, I didn’t notice many more FPS in games for example.

It’s a mastodon post where “Fedora” is typed as a hashtag, and then it is followed by “Linux 41…”. The title should say “Fedora Linux 41 will be released on October 29”

Bazzite Bazzite Bazzite!

I was at the same point a while ago.

Everything I touch breaks, and I also had enough of my system breaking because updating with an unstable power grid is like playing russian roulette.

I turned to Fedora Silverblue first, then rebased to uBlue. Aurora first, and then Bazzite. Silverblue feels exactly as the regular variant, Aurora is great for desktop use, and for my gaming PC, Bazzite is fucking great. It just works.

It comes with a lot of tweaks and super many small additions that just make your life easier, especially for gaming.

Updates just happen in the background when there’s nothing better to do and get applied to the next boot image. And in case something doesn’t work as expected, you can always go back in time.

You can also customise it almost/ just as much as regular distros, but it isn’t quite as easy if you want to customise A LOT (e.g. using TWMs).

I didn’t notice huge performance boosts tho, it just comes with more tools ootb, for example to make your GPU more silent when idle.

As said, Bazzite is based on Fedora, so you always get new great modern stuff, at the same time as the other Fedora users do.

For the beginning, I would recommend you to stick to a more popular Distro, like Mint, Fedora, Debian, and therelike.

Many niche distros, like CachyOS, are more tailored towards advanced users who know what they’re up to, or for special use cases, like TailsOS for extreme privacy (e.g. buying drugs, journalism, etc., it’s also commonly installed on an USB stick for portability and non-persistency).

With Fedora or Mint you get way more community support and resources in case something doesn’t work as expected for you.

They’re also (mostly) identical performance wise.

For gaming, I would recommend you Bazzite, which gives you a first class gaming experience, and is extremely robust due to it being a completely new kind of distro. It also has the Nvidia-drivers already baked in if chosen, which makes it more reliable.

But regular Fedora (especially the KDE spin) or other common distros are perfectly fine too for that.

I’ve had this happen more often than I’d like to admit.

There were quite a few instances where I just couldn’t game in the evening after turning on my PC, mostly because of my power supply (outages while updating, unstable grid, damaged PSU and hard drive, etc.) and my ability to shoot myself in the foot in regards to my IT skills.

I imagined spending my friday evening differently than chrooting my install from another USB more often than I’d like to admit. At least Linux is repairable, good luck trying that with Windows…

Now, thankfully, I live in another house with a landlord that actually cares that I don’t get electrocuted in my shower, and I don’t have those problems anymore. I also don’t tinker as much with my OS anymore, at least not much.

Still, Fedora Atomic feels way more robust and less buggy than regular Fedora, especially KDE. And the QoL tweaks from uBlue are great too!

Probably Bluefin-DX.

The “DX” stands for developer experience. It’s a variant of uBlue/ Fedora Atomic (Silverblue) with a lot of added programming tools like Brew, Nix, IDEs, local LLMs, and more.

You can read more about it on the website.

There’s also Aurora, which is the same, but with KDE instead of Gnome.

The dx-images are meant to be a plug-and-play solution for developers. You just install it, share your container config to your project colleagues, and go. Don’t worry about not being able to work because of a bad update or some misalignments in your package manager broke your OS. Most stuff is containerised, and if your host breaks, you can just roll back, because the system is basically powered by git.

I’m no developer, but I use the regular variant for casual purposes (no specific tasks, mostly browser) on my laptop, and Bazzite (also very similar, but gaming focused) on my desktop, and both are wonderful! They’re the most boring distro/ OS I’ve used yet, and that’s great. They’re immutable/ image based and always work reliably.

I can really recommend them for a lot of people, from ranging from IT professionals to my mum.

I totally understand your wish, absolutely valid. From what I know Mint supports secure boot.

There aren’t many things that prevent that, but one might be the Nvidia driver. Were you able to boot into Mint and install it or similar things? Or did you just get greeted by the error message?

Maybe try downloading the image again and reflash it with another tool (e.g. Fedora Media Writer instead of Etcher) on another USB if you have one. It might be totally possible that your .iso did get corrupted in the process. And then do the whole process again.

I believe I had something similar a long time ago when I aborted the download and then resumed it, or when I pulled the USB too quickly without safely ejecting it beforehand.

I don’t use Mint, but secure boot is something that usually works by default on most distros.

Afaik, secure boot won’t increase the security as much as you think.

Did you try to reinstall it? From what you’ve written, you have some trouble with booting it. Maybe you selected some wrong partition schemes? The best one would be to select “Wipe whole drive and install”.

Did you disable secure boot, install it, and the enable it again? If yes, don’t. Boot your ISO from the USB with secure boot enabled and install it from there.

Btw, if you worry about security, then also consider also enabling full disk encryption, or at least the encryption of /home/

I wanted to add my own comment first, but yours covers it very well.

OP will be very happy with KDE and its’ app ecosystem.

About distro choice, it doesn’t matter very much.

My top recommendation would be Fedora Atomic KDE (Bazzite or Aurora), because it “just works”, has zero maintenence, will never break, and especially on Bazzite, gives you a first class gaming experience.

Other than Bazzite/ Aurora, I can of course recommend classic Fedora KDE, because of the sane defaults and both modern and stable release schedule.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed would be great if OP wants something that’s both bleeding edge and reliable, and EndeavourOS if they like Arch with very sane defaults, but more minimal than Tumbleweed.

I also made a very similar comment, but with uBlue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin) instead.

They are still pretty vanilla, but include a big list of QoL stuff added in, like staged updates, Distrobox, a huge list gaming tweaks in Bazzite, and much more.

It’s basically stock Atomic made right!

I’ve used them for a year now, and they’re fantastic!

Just a small heads up for OP: You have to do quite a lot of (advanced) things differently from now on if you choose Atomic. Use containers (Distrobox, etc.) for everything you can, avoid installing stuff on the host if possible, etc.

Because others already suggested Arch/ EndeavourOS, I’ll be suggesting something else: Bazzite.

It’s part of the image based (“immutable”) Fedora series and is basically Fedora Kinoite, with all drivers and codecs already set up for you, self managing, with many gaming tweaks included.

It’s rock solid and basically unbreakable, while also being extremely modern and updated. On Arch, even if it doesn’t break, you always get the newest stuff, which might not be as polished. On Fedora, it matures a few months, while still being very modern.

The main target group is “For Linux users who don’t want to use Linux”, meaning, it runs all your favourite stuff (KDE, etc.) without having to care for anything. It even updates itself automatically in the background without any interference.

If you prefer something with less “bloat” (a lot of optional tools and software to choose from, but nothing mandatory), then check out Aurora, which is basically the same, but without gaming stuff.

For more information, check out universal-blue.org

Just a small heads up for OP: You have to do quite a lot of (advanced) things differently from now on if you choose Atomic.

Use containers (Distrobox, etc.) for everything you can, avoid installing stuff on the host if possible, etc.

Just use Flatpaks for 95% you do graphically, and for CLI stuff or software that isn’t available as Flatpak, I would recommend you to create an Arch Distrobox container (already set up IIRC) and use that. You can even install stuff from the AUR and export it, so it works just like it is supposed to.

Maybe, another consideration might be to not run Linux on Windows in some way, but the other way around.

Linux offers great virtualization, maybe you can use QEMU with KVM and GPU passthrough, and then run Windows inside this box.

I find Linux more powerful and less annoying to use day to day, and having those annoyances inside a small virtualized container I can just shut down is more peaceful.

WSL can be restricting, since Linux can’t access anything, and I think getting “the real and proper thing” might be better.

And dual booting, by having both Windows and Linux on the same drive, is something I would advise against. Windows doesn’t play nice with others and often “accidentally” breaks the bootloader and hard drive permissions, leading only to trouble. If you dual boot, install them on a separate drive and select the booting drive manually in the BIOS.

Also, why do you want to run Ubuntu specifically? Did you also look up for alternatives, like Fedora or Debian?

Dual booting Pros: a full-fledged Linux OS Cons: Harder to install and to mantain.

Also, sometimes Windows being an ass and “accidentally” breaking the bootloader.

I advice anyone to have just one OS per drive installed. Keep Windows and Linux separate if possible, or some Windows update may break GRUB.

I use Casa"OS". It’s fine, but nothing groundbreaking. Cockpit for example can do pretty much the same, and for Docker containers, I nowadays mostly use docker compose.

But hey, it helped me a quite a bit in the beginning, and it’s cool. Pretty basic, but enough for most people, mainly beginners.

Then how do you explain the continued success of Mint?

Because Mint’s philosophy is to make a friendly, simple and usable system for everyone.

That may be for people who came from Windows before, or those who like their OS to be a bit more conservative, meaning no flashy stuff, boring, and just working. Just like Windows was “in the good ol’ days”.

This makes it accessible and usable by everyone, including Linux sysadmins who come home after work and don’t want to deal with annoying computers and fixing things.

Everything on Mint feels high quality, functional and cohesive.

ElementaryOS on the other hand feels like a cheap MacOS clone, but nothing works. Those who want Mac, buy a Mac.

Mint/ Cinnamon on the other hand is similar to Windows (XP, 7, etc.), but not a copycat. It’s familiar enough to be intuitive for Windows users, but much enough it’s own thing.

Mint’s main focus is to get a uncomplicated, and usable system, while Elementary’s focus is to just do what Apple does. … Well, did. 15 years ago. They totally forgot how much work maintaining a distro and a desktop with a whole app suite is, and just stopped working on it.

While Gnome and KDE (and other WMs/ DEs) got magnitudes better in just one year (e.g. Plasma 6), Pantheon (and Elementary) just stagnated the last 5 years or so.

They don’t even offer/ work on Wayland yet, or other new things.

Either they’ll stop working on Elementary, and focus only on Pantheon, so it can live on on other distros, or it will just continue dying like it does currently.

Logseq and Obsidian are only similar on the first look, but very different usage wise. Both are very open with a plugin system, and you can modify them to turn them into one eachother.

So, if you want only FOSS, then Logseq is the only choices you have.

But Obsidian is, even though it’s proprietary, very sane. Open plug-in system, active community, great devs who don’t have much against FOSS, and more.

Obsidian

• More similar to a classic note taking app, like OneNote, but with a lot of features. Hierarchical structure, and more of an “essay” style, where you store a lot of text in one page.
• Page linking is only done when you think it makes sense
• Has been a bit longer around than Logseq, feels more polished
• Great sync and mobile app, which support plugins from what I’ve heard

Logseq

• Non-linear outliner. Every page is on the same level, but within a text passage, the indentation matters (parent-child-relationship)
• You create a LOT of more pages. Most of my pages are empty. They are mainly there for linking topics. I rarely create pages manually.
• The journal is where you write most stuff. You then link each block to a page.
• Logseq a bit “special”. May not be for everyone. I for example am a bit of a disorganised thinker, who mentally links a lot of knowledge and throws concepts around all the time. Logseq is my second nature, because it’s more flexible. My GF on the other hand is more structured, and prefers something like Apple Notes, or, if she would care about note taking, something like Obsidian.
• The mobile app isn’t great. It’s fine when I’m not at home, but the desktop version is the “proper” one, and mobile/ iPad a second class citizen.
• Sync is only experimental for now. It will soon be officially supported (hopefully) and self hostable, but it worked fine for me.