I’ve been meaning to make the leap for some time, but I had a hiccup with Mint a little while ago, and my key reason for choosing Mint above all others has disappeared. My Windows machine is doing the usual “you’ve had this installed for a while so it’s just going to keep getting slower unless you do a fresh re-install” thing that Windows seems to do, and I’ve got more time on my hands than last time I tried, so I figure why not put that time to use.

The first thing is that I’ve got an nVidia card. I’m not allergic to having to play around with settings and download drivers, but it’d be nice to have something that just works with that card and which is designed to work with that card, rather than having to bodge something together out of sellotape & string.

I also have 3 monitors. And they don’t all connect with the same kind of socket/lead. I believe that both nVidia & multiple monitors, and especially nVidia and multiple monitors is a bit of a sticky point with many distros.

I am something of a gamer, but I don’t tend to play stuff which is resource-intensive. No AAA titles. Think more “games which cost £20 or under on Steam”. So I don’t think I need a distro which is optimised for gaming, but I would like one where I’m likely to be able to play most things I own with a minimal amount of fudging.

I do have some utilities that I use. I’d like to avoid dual-booting, if possible, but I understand that it might be necessary. Reaper has a native Linux version, so that’s not a problem, but if I understand correctly using vst & clap plug-ins might need some attention? Again, if that can be done with as little difficulty as possible, then that’d be great. I also have a usb keyboard/controller (piano, not typing), so if there’s any potential issues with that, it’d be nice if the distro had been built with something like that in mind.

I also do some video/photo stuff, which don’t have Linux-native versions. I use Affinity (v2 and the newly-released version), Magix Vegas, and Wondershare Filmora. I don’t know if it’d be possible to run any of them in a virtual machine or something. I have tried the Linux-native alternatives, and while they have their merits, I won’t be able to use them as full replacements.

Now, perhaps unusually for a newbie, when it comes to wanting something I’m familiar with, I’m actually not bothered by having an envirnment which resembles Windows. In fact, I think it’d probably be a plus if the distro does things differently. It’s fun to try different things, and if someone’s genuinely thought “this is a better way of doing this”, then I’m happy to give it a go. As long as there’s decent documentation. I’m not allergic to the idea of the terminal or otherwise having to use typed commands (I have a Raycast-ish-like app on Windows which I use to launch apps and search for files, for example), but I’m also not very experienced with that and would need very good, very newbie-friendly documentation.

And for customisation, I’d like to be able to be able to make it look pretty. Juxtopposed’s recent Linux video was very cool, and I could see myself wanting to do something like that but, unlike her, I’ve got very little coding experience and if there were any coding involved I’d need even better documentation than I would for the command line stuff. And, this really isn’t important, but ATM I run an app called Lively Wallpaper, which allows me to make it look like the glass looking onto the desktop has rain running down it. If there just happens to be a reasonably simple and non-resource-hogging way to have animated wallpapers, then that’d be a lovely bonus.

So that’s it. Sorry for the long, rambly wall of text, but I feel like for responses to be truly helpful, people should know exactly what it is I’m looking for. Please ask any follow-up questions if that’ll help with suggestions. I think I’ve said everything which could be important, but I don’t know what I don’t know.