Debian stable. You’ll be fine.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Try Debian, nut ubuntu, it just makes problems

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

Between these two, Cachy.

If choice is open: Fedora.

“Gaming” focussed distros are often a worse choice imo, because they offer zero performance benefit, are bloated in an attempt to bundle drivers out of the box, are harder to troubleshoot because worse documentation, and the preinstalled configs can cause headaches.

Caution, dual-boot means you have to power down your system before you can start the other, if you share any file systems. Hibernate and then booting another distro will result in file system damage.

The alternative would be a virtual machine.

It can also occasionally mess up the grub configuration, which means you have to reinstall grub.

If you want a good first Linux experience, stick with anything Ubuntu-/Debian-based; they are

• stable workhorses, i.e. they don’t break on you as easily as rolling release distros like CachyOS.
• wildly popular, i.e. you’ll find plenty of resources to help you get started (although, to be fair, the Arch wiki is also ridiculously detailed).

Whatever you do, steer clear of immutable distros like Bazzite for now. As cool as the concept is (I run Bazzite on my gaming machine) - as soon as you do something “non-standard” (and modding your Minecraft .jar with Optifine already qualifies as such), you’ll have to fiddle with the terminal and distrobox containers, both of which will be alien concepts for you at the start and may be top much to make it a good first impression.

In my opinion vanilla Fedora is the best beginner distro. And once you get comfortable with Linux you can try Arch, CashyOS, rpm-ostree based distros or anything else.

CachyOS or Ubuntu?

With all due respect to Ubuntu, but this isn’t even a comparison. I’d try to give you a fair answer if you’d stated Garuda, for example, or Nobara, or Bazzite instead of Ubuntu, because these distros actually put in an effort for gaming specifically, but Ubuntu? It’s a workstation distro and it’s gaming performance is basically whatever the default is on “Linux” as a whole.

I have personally been using CachyOS for over two years now and I’ve been very happy with it. Their installer recognizes your gpu automatically and installs the right drivers for you.

Not to take away from the other ones, I’m sure they have amazing work/performance, too, but this is my experience because I’ve tried all of the distros I’ve mentioned above and CachyOS was the best for me personally.

Your mileage may vary of course. The best thing to do is try different distros and find out for yourself. Make sure your data is backed up while you hop between them until you chose one.

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.

I would throw bazzite in as an option, especially for a new user.

Bazzite has a good out of the box experience, is meant for gaming, and it uses an immutable distro.

In my opinion the only reason people don’t like immutable distros is bad habits that are hard to break, or wanting highly custom system configurations, both do not apply to a new user. If you never go into the terminal there’s no difference, and if you do a system like brew works pretty well.

The advantage of an immutable system are that you can’t mess up your system and it’s more secure. It also stops you from doing dangerous things or leasing habits that require modifying system packages without knowing what they do.

For just gaming and desktop use (with KDE), it’s a good low maintenance system.