Every bit of pain I've had since installing Ubuntu is to do with Snap.

I can't even get Firefox to play videos smoothly.

Any, then. https://www.protondb.com/app/1364780

Usually distros don't affect game compatibility

I think the whole works part is the most important part, Linux can be janky (and by that I mean obsolete information and deprecated or outdated packages are often recommended and there are a thousand different ways to do anything with only one of them actually working (don't have an aneurysm)) on the best of days, If something just works you can change what you want later.

I use arch, btw

A man of God surrounded by heathens

What does the Oracle say today?

that should be their mission statement.

Use Debian. No good reason to change.

I went with Nobara because it's pretty much Fedora + gaming related fixes. Meaning every Fedora guide out there works and Fedora on its own is pretty user friendly.

Excel, as in Microsoft Excel might be a problem. If she needs something Excel-like, the default LibreOffice stuff is very capable, but it's not 100% compatible, really depends on what she needs. The online Office 365 thing might also be enough.

As for the Windows partition, a simple virtual machine might be enough and you don't have to reboot the PC every time you need to open an Excel file.

Honestly, most people keep a Windows partition anyway. I have one for Fusion 360 which intermittently stops working in Bottles.

I landed on Mint because it's a simple no fuss distro that feels familiar to Windows refugees. I game on it just fine and use my computer for a lot of things so wanted something general. I bounced off Ubuntu because it has some decisions that are trying to protect you from actually learning Linux, which is a priority to me.

As a professional spreadsheet pusher, I can confidently say that LibreOffice (the Linux version of MS Office) has been able to do everything I needed that word/excel can, and then some.

But really any distro will be able to install the software you need, and it's easy to switch. Just try it and have fun.

Nothing wrong with them, surely better than Ubuntu, despite the meme.

I went from Nobara to Bazzite and it feels way more polished, although the immutable thing may not be for everyone

Those distros are fine, I haven't heard anything bad about them. The only distros I wouldn't recommend are Ububtu and Manjaro (I can explain why if you want).

About Excel, it doesn't work on Linux unfortunately. But you have some options. You can try LibreOffice and OnlyOffice (you can install them on Windows to try them out before switching) and see if they're enough for your needs. There's also a web version of Excel which you can use in your browser but it doesn't have all the features. If you really need Excel, you can also try using a virtual machine with Windows and run it inside of that but dual booting might be easier for you at that point.

Bazzite over Nobara, IMO.

From what I understand, it's still an excellent choice. It's well supported and decent for new users.

Can you look into if the online version of Excel works for your wife? That might simplify your install. Libre Office and OnlyOffice are decent alternatives, but they might not map 1:1 with the instructions she gets from school.

Bazzite is an immutable distro, and it expects you to install all your programs through containers. Not all software works with these containers, but like 99.9999% does. I'm a weirdo who wants the deepest of hardware monitoring tools and many of them don't work with these containers. I haven't used Nobara yet but it doesn't appear to be immutable and based on regular Fedora so it shouldn't have those issues.

excel

It may run through wine, and I'd test that out before fully committing. Worst case if that's the ONLY thing you need you could do a VM. But would the cloud (web) version of office work for her? If you're already paying for office 365 then I believe you get it included.

Bazzite is fantastic, but because the system is immutable, you can’t just install packages like you can with other distros. This makes it very stable and very secure, but it also means you need to take extra steps if you want to get creative with your system. If you are already familiar with Docker and containers, then you can do anything you want that way, if there isn’t already a flatpak available. As a last resort, you can also use rpm-ostree to create new layers, but if you go that route you need to understand how to use ostree since eventually you will need to fix those layers manually.

The main reason why I would steer newcomers away from the likes of Bazzite or Nobara is because I don't think they're going to last long. CachyOS has sprung up just as I was starting to hear less and less about Nobara. They get trendy as THE distro for newbies to install because it has a gimmick or two aimed at newcomers, which will inevitably get rolled into the mainstream, fixed, rendered obsolete or otherwise dealt with in the mainstream within a couple years anyway, then it's off to the next one.

Who here remembers PeppermintOS being the hottest thing?

I'm not familiar with the above distros, but I'm pretty certain there's more people on Ubuntu which helps a lot with troubleshooting and finding solutions online. One option is, when installing any Linux OS, is to create a separate partition for "home/". that way, you can reinstall any other Linux based OS, and keep most of your files installed.

Excel doesn't work on Linux, but LibreOffice and Google sheets do.

I've had a much better experience with OnlyOffice compared to LibreOffice in terms of MS compatibility, and it's a Flatpak so it should have no issues running under Bazzite.

Both are great, as is Fedora, the one that both are based on.

Nobara had some issues updating correctly for me, but I haven’t seen anyone else express that, so I don’t think it’s a common thing.

Bazzite is really gaming focused, so it’s harder to do general purpose computing on it than a desktop OS.

But they are both great OSes, and really you should just try out a bunch of them and pick the one you like the most. They’re free after all.

I usually get downvoted for this since it's not open source, but WPS Office is free and basically an exact ms office clone. I use it regularly moving files between my work laptop with windows

Setting up qemu is easy, vm that opens the apps as windows so it seems native while running off a vm works well with cpu based stuff

I thought I saw something that the bazzite project might end once Fedora moves away from the 32 bit packages:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/06/bazzite-would-shut-down-if-fedora-goes-ahead-with-removing-32-bit/

I've had Bazzite break its own update utility such that it needed manual intervention at least 3 times now. I see no point in a "just works" distro that doesn't actually just work.

I had a couple of minor issues when it was new, but it's been rock solid for months. The only issue I had recently turned out to be a major bug in Steam that is currently being fixed.

I won't use Ubuntu Desktop now, but I used it for 6 years: 16 to 22, and loved it for many reasons. I left it for two reasons:

1. Snaps
2. Trying to get bridged networking going for VMs in Boxes ended up wrecking my network settings and I couldn't get them back to normal. With more expertise I could have probably fixed it, but I realised it's too easy to do things that I can't fix.

So, I went to NixOS for the declarative setup. It's not always easy especially for niche cases , but at least I always have a working backup. Yes, there are other options, but I like NixOS so I plan to stick with it for now.

My kids use Bazzite and I like that too.

Fedoras where it's at!

That is the thing of it. I started with Slackware. Then Debian and moved to ubuntu. I'm still using ubuntu. I've loaded up some other distros but they bring nothing definitive to the table. I've installed pop os and it works. If it had existed when I moved away from slackware I might have picked it. If you are using it and its working for you why bother changing.

I went Ubuntu > Mint > Ubuntu > Pop_os. The only difference I've noticed is Pop breaks less often.

I used Mint for a good long while, but went to Fedora KDE for better Wayland support. KDE is quite different to Cinnamon, not sure I have the words to articulate how. It's fussier. The main difference about Fedora is package management, DNF is slower than APT, a lot less software is packaged as RPMs, and a lot of "we don't package it, you have to compile it" software offers no instructions for Fedora, and trying to translate the Debian/Ubuntu instructions practically always fails because the library they want you to install isn't there. So Fedora is Linux with less software.

Which is reason enough to go with Debian (I have an unreasonable issue with snaps).