I was between CachyOS and Bazzite and decided for Bazzite for being a more stable and hassle free OS from what I read, because it’s not a rolling distro with frequent updates that may break something. I went all in, deleting my Windows partition and am pretty happy with it ao far. I do have Affinity and Concepts that are windows only and I’m using VirtualBox for those.

Between those two, CachyOS for sure. You are already running LMDE, imo there is zero benefit to dual-booting with Ubuntu… You are likely going to be running into the exact same problems you already are.

The biggest problem with Linux distros is choice paralysis. I’d recommend Fedora/(K/X)Ubuntu/Mint as a first choice.

Fedora is very up to date, so if you’re giddy to try new desktop environment updates (like gnome, KDE, not Cosmic until it’s more mature), then go Fedora with the spin you think you’ll like the most, visually.

Ubuntu is updated all at once every year/2 years or so. By the time an update reaches Ubuntu, it’s already old news. It’s much more stable because there’s less to diagnose, and everything is essentially worked out before it hits your PC.

Mint is Ubuntu, but heavily modified with user friendly changes in mind. From what I’ve seen though, the default theme is really dated, visually, and may not have creature comforts (I haven’t used mint in over a decade).

Bazzite is for you if you are afraid to brick your computer with a stray terminal command; it’s designed to be very resilient to beginner mistakes by taking away root access from the user.

CachyOS/Endevour (Arch based) are great distros, but you’ll be given a laundry list of choices for everything from your web browser, desktop environment, terminal, shell, file browser, and more. If you’re new to Linux, there’s simply too much choice for things you won’t understand yet. Even if you’re into customization, you’re better off trying one of the above as a baseline and going down the customization rabbit hole from there!

Hm… LMDE is Debian under the hood, so if you have non standard requirements then you have to be flexible to make something to work, combining .deb repositories with other solutions like flatpaks, distrobox, compiling from source, nix, guix, appimages, wine prefixes, etc. Just don’t mess with system directories and libraries and you’re good.

Maybe Mint were a better choice to a newbie, but in the end it’s almost the same thing with some nice driver utilities. Look for the release in December.

My experience with Ubuntu desktop has always been a real poor one but I realize other people like it. I’d go with cachy or endevourOS personally. My wife has probably less technical skill than you do and I’ve had her on endevourOS for nearly a year at this point. All she does is YouTube and gaming and it all runs near flawlessly. I also have both our systems dual booted but I also can’t remember the last time I booted into windows for either machine.

Might just be my old experience (happy to learn otherwise) but dual booting ended up with more of a painful experience than not. When Windows would update, it would fuck my grub up and cause issues booting into Linux and Windows. You can fix it (most of the time) but expect to do it rather often; especially unpleasant as a beginner.

I know there’s issues with GPU passthrough on vms but IDK if dual booting is the moves unless they seriously improved the experience in the last couple years.

Definitely Fedora. It needs a bit of setting up, but otherwise has awesome security and rather recent packages.

Install Ubuntu and see if you can get your games and video editing software to work. If you can’t, go for CachyOS.

Why Ubuntu first? Because millions of people have been using it for years. When something breaks, you’ll be able to fix it because someone else would have already encountered this issue before and reported it.

Catchy and then Arch when you learned 👍

Debian stable. You’ll be fine.