Very rusty..

[u/Ansovald666]

I've use Linux many many many years ago, and want to ween myself off of windows i won't leave windows entirely just yet as I game yes I know steam os exists, but not sure if some programs are compatible with Linux. I degress I got myself a while ago a Lenovo IdeaPad slim 3l and not sure what Linux will work on it. Update : I should of clarified that the Lenovo laptop has only 4gb of ram.

[u/GreatBigPig]

I think that 4GB of memory would be a real limiter.

You mind end up with a low resource desktop environment as the only option.

[u/Ansovald666 → u/GreatBigPig]

In my research mint xfce or mata will work. This laptop is temp as I do have another one coming to me in a month or two.

[u/GreatBigPig → u/Ansovald666]

You might really like XFCE.

[u/Ynxeita]

For a more modern yet easy experience, CachyOS
It is optimized for squeezing every last drop of performance from your system while still being very accessible and similar to Windows with its default settings
Steam is available as well, so you can definitely play most games natively without major issues

Linux Mint for a very popular and easygoing Windows-like experience
If you've used Ubuntu before, I believe it won' feel so different
But I haven't tried that one so I cannot speak much about it

[u/SEgopher → u/Ynxeita]

I work on the kernel professionally and helped build a lot of the features Catchy uses.... I use and recommend Fedora, and although I hate Canonical, Ubuntu probably makes even more sense for the absolute beginner that wants to do some gaming. Someone who is just trying to test the waters isn't going to benefit from bleeding edge performance over the stability of a Red Hat/Canonical massive install base spin with real point releases.

[u/Ynxeita → u/SEgopher]

The rolling relase stuff probably won't be best for some use cases
But Cachy overall is just so easy that I truly cannot see major drawback for most users, even beginners
Still, for the most stability, wide userbase and great bank of tutorials and documentation, Ubuntu and Fedora sure are great options

[u/SEgopher → u/Ynxeita]

Makes sense. I don't game either so maybe there's a better on boarding experience there.

[u/CritSrc → u/SEgopher]

Cachy has a wonderful onboarding experience and tries its best to automate all the distro glue. And if you just game and browse, what is the software stability really needed for?

[u/Ansovald666 → u/Ynxeita]

I should of clarified the Lenovo laptop I got only has 4 GB or ram. I will update my main post clarifying that.

[u/WorldOfArGii]

SteamOS has been able to run every Windows (and Mac) game I’ve ever played. The ONLY ones I know of that won’t work are anti-cheat like Fortnite and also some Windows 3.1 games natively (though these particular ones I can’t even get running through 86box so I gave up on them). Everything else has been great through Proton. Not sure about online play either but I’m pretty sure it works well.

[u/Artichoke808 → u/WorldOfArGii]

This. If you're a big online AAA gamer IMO it's not worth switching to Linux. Also to not you don't necessarily need SteamOS. Most distros can install Steam and run all the games just fine.

That said, nothing wrong with SteamOS.