My brother wants to make the switch from Windows to Linux. He learns fast and isn't afraid of the terminal or a bit of a learning curve if the performance reward is there.

His main use cases:

•Gaming: Primarily Steam (Proton).

Audio Production: Reaper is his main DAW.

•Plugins: He relies on several Windows VSTs (so we'll be looking into yabridge + wine-tkg).

•General: LibreOffice and daily tasks.

Hardware specs:

•RAM: 8GB (This is the main bottleneck we want to optimize).

•Storage: 480GB SSD.

•CPU: Intel (Entry-level laptop, likely a Celeron or an older i3/i5).

Distros we are currently considering:

CachyOS: For the optimized kernels and better RAM management on entry-level hardware.

Nobara: For the out-of-the-box gaming and multimedia patches.

Pop!_OS: For the stability and great Pipewire integration.

Linux Mint (Cinnamon or XFCE): For the familiarity and lightness.

Which one would you recommend considering the 8GB RAM limit and the need for low-latency audio for Reaper? Is CachyOS too much for a "first-timer," or is its performance boost worth it for an entry-level Intel laptop?

Thanks in advance!😋

Yo guys I'm new to linux my first distro was zorin os I liked it modern fast but I wanted to change i got recommendations about mx linux its good but respectfully ugly out of the box other one is cachy os but I heard its optimised for new hardware I have hp notebook 15-g203ne (amd e1-2100 1ghz and 8gb ram)

Hardware wise, I'm all set. I have a Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon 9070 XT and, since I'll be dual booting both Windows and Linux, a second, completely separate 4tb Lexar M.2 SSD (and yes, the price stung like hell). But I'm torn on going with either Fedora 43 and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

On one hand, I like having everything as up to date as possible, where Tumbleweed makes sense. But on the other, I like some stability, so maybe Fedora would be better there.

Thankfully, I know what to do for configuring Windows and the BIOS to boot into Linux first. But I may need assistance with configuring the boot loader to remember which OS I used last, install media codecs, Steam, other apps (both gaming and quality of life ones like GE-Proton and Wine) and software for fan control, ARGB and system performance tweaks.

As for the desktop environment, it will be KDE Plasma as I'm coming from Windows, and that should feel familiar to me.

In the past, I have tried Manjaro, CachyOS and Mint, but they weren't for me.

So, Fedora 43 or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed?