Admittedly, I’m probably not the best person to ask for recommendation of a noob-friendly distro, but I feel people are overthinking this. If someone produces a list which includes distros I’ve never heard of, I think they spent too much time on ‘Top 10 Noob Friendly Distros in 2025’ websites.

If you really care about my recommendation, just start with Mint.

PS. I should also add, this isn’t criticism of you or any other new user who does search online for recommendation. This is more a comment on state of the Internet where there are so many websites which seem to pad their list with obscure distros where really all such articles should give recommendation for one of the same three distributions. Which three I don’t exactly know.

You may need to try a few to make the most of your hardware config. Make a few bootable USB drives, and spend an evening trying your options I’d say at least pop!os, manjaro and nobara to cover the main distro bases. But everything is pretty good these days and everything has corner cases that cause trouble.

At the end of the day, any Distro that you pick will be essentially the same, as far as handling WoW. I have played WoW over the years on the multiple Linux Distros that I have used. The best way would be via Proton from within Steam. I tend to like the custom Proton version - Glorious Eggroll’s version.

For Linux Distros, pick one that is heavily documented like Ubuntu / Mint, both Debian based and tons of troubleshooting articles in case you need to reference them. Tend to prefer Mint between these two, personal choice. I tend to prefer Arch based ones, since they have what is called the AUR (Arch user Repo) which allows more complied apps to be downloaded and used on the system.

You can install battlenet with steam, just add it as a non-steam game and proton does everything for you. I did it yesterday.

Like others have mostly said, Mint is a great choice.

All the different distros can basically all do the same things for the most part. The main differences between them are mostly philosophical and don’t matter to a new user.

Once you get comfortable with linux, you can easily switch to a different distro if you get annoyed with something.

For now, just choose a popular distro that you think has a nice user interface.

I think mint, popos, and Ubuntu are all great choices.

Try each for a week. Go through the installs. Set up a thing and do a update.

Make notes! I can’t stress this enough, want to actually learn a bit make a small note on why you like what you like and why you don’t. Ease of install, ease of finding support, ease of updating, and so on.

Shrug I distro hopped a lot. Tried a bunch before I stick with arch. Even did manjaro and ubuntu.

The beauty of linux is there’s a lot of options and choices.

As long as all of your drivers working fine, I don’t think it matter all that much on which distro you choose

Nvidia graphics is terrible on Linux you need to switch, honestly use Linux mint, it feels like windows and makes it easy to switch

Do Bazzite. It will be unbeatable for just working and ease of use.

Stay away from Manjaro for anything.

SteamOS that Valve offers is not the same as what’s on the Steam Deck. It’s extremely dated and is what it used to be. A real distro from Valve has yet to be released.

The best way to install WoW is using Lutris, which also comes with Bazzite. You search for and install Battle.net, then you can install WoW normally. Lutris can also add a WoW shortcut once WoW is installed, too.

You can also just copy and paste the WoW folder from your Windows Program Files folder. It keeps all your settings and addons.

For addons use Wowup-curse. It’s a open source addon manager that is just straight up better than all others.

Currently, WoW needs Proton-GE to work. Using wine-staging, or the dated wine-ge, and Battle.net will have problems starting. It’s something weird with authentication and connecting online. Proton-GE contains a patch specifically for this.

The easiest way to get Proton-GE is using Protonup-Qt if using KDE plasma, or Proton Plus if you’re using Gnome. For Protonup-QT, you select Steam, then install Proton-GE for Steam. Lutris will also be able to use it.

Just general advice, I’d use the latest Proton-GE as the default for all Steam games.

In Lutris set the runner for Battle.net to Proton-GE.

Source: I’ve tried all but Drauger OS, and currently play retail WoW.

I just rebuilt my wife’s old Dell laptop (AMD with a super generic Intel on-board GPU). It’s now running Debian stable + KDE and WoW installed easily under Lutris (start with their Battle.net wizard). Diablo III runs as well, but with some weird grphical glitches. Wife thinks they’re cool tho, so I stopped trying to fix it. Anyway, WoW seems playable enough for her, though super crowded towns like Orgramar (sp?) occassionally crash the game.

I’ve played WoW on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. No problems there.

I personally (I’m sure others will disagree) would recommend skipping Manjaro and maybe Pop.

If you want to try Arch based pick Endeavor instead of Manjaro.

It seems like new folks have a lot of trouble with Pop to me. Out of the Ubuntu-based side I’d choose Mint over the rest.

Also don’t discount base Debian, people sneer at it because of the speed of the update cycle but the other side of that is it being the least likely to blow up on a new user.

Full disclosure: My devices are currently split between endeavor and Debian, depending on my tolerance for things breaking. I know fuck all about Bazzite/Nobara/Fedora.

I would personally recommend popos or mint. I have varying amount of experience with the others.

Bazzite is very hyped on Lemmy, I don’t quite understand how it works, it seems good for what it is, but I don’t know if I would recommend it as someone’s first Linux daily driver.

Manjaro seems great most of the time, until the maintainers mess something up and royally screw up your system. But that’s just things I’ve heard, your milage will vary.

Nobara worked really well for me, but ultimately I wasn’t very comfortable to use a distro maintained by one guy, even if that guy is glorious egg roll.

I personally use popos. I wish it was fedora based like Nobara, but you can’t have it all. Wow works straight out the box. There are appimages or deb packages for warcraft logs and curse as well, so they work fine.

I personally wouldn’t look for a distro made just for gaming. I’m currently using Fedora 41 on my PCs and I’ve just closed Red Dead Redemption 2 a few minutes ago, also played baldurs gate and resident evil 4.

Fedora works great for me using it for everything

Try using all of them in a vm and see which one you like