CachyOS. Hands down the best for you.
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Gets updates as soon as they come out which is important for gaming and software development
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Really good performance, has access to a huge amount of software
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Beginner friendly, automatically creates snapshots (backups) in case you mess up
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Has a simple to follow wiki with lots of useful info. Also it lets you install all the gaming packages you need with one button click.
No offense to people on this site but every time this thread pops up there are a lot of terrible recommendations being thrown around. Don’t bother using base Arch linux if you’re new to Linux. Don’t use random niche distros like MX Linux. Debian is very barebones and requires you to manually set up a lot of things that come by default in other modern distros. And finally IMO don’t use an immutable OS unless you know what you’re getting into, as many people get burned by how hard it is to install applications on them.



Relatively niche distro, relatively barebones installation, and it’s mostly aimed at low end PCs. There’s no point in someone new using that instead of any other popular distro.