This is the correct answer.

Helldivers can complete any mission in 48 hours. Just ask Sony…

Ease of installation would be a huge one. Pop was run the installer from USB and go. After it was online there was just installing steam and whatever games I wanted. I have not dug further into void or what its capable of. I wanted as little fiddling as possible. To me the interface felt good out of the box.

I mainly sought out Pop!OS after reading about people's experience with it and gaming and liked what I heard. I jumped directly from windows 11 to Pop. If void works for you, that's awesome. This was my "how do I get it running now without messing around" moment. I really just wanted to game, immediately after install. Later on I started to fiddle with things.

I will second Pop!OS. I have it installed on my gaming desktop and have been very satisfied with its stability and ability to play every game I’ve wanted to. Between Steams Proton layer and Wine (with the wineglass GUI) there is nothing I want for right now.

(I do run an AMD card, YMMV with an Nvidia one as I cannot speak to experience with that).

I do use Mint for my laptop/daily driver outside of gaming and love that as well. In my mind the two distributions fit the use cases well.

I have installed PopOS and so far it’s been very stable. Most of the games I play are on Steam and support has been pretty awesome (BG3, CP2077, Valheim, Warhammer 40k: Inquisitor). For non-Steam games, WINE with the Wine Glass GUI has been great, allowing me to run older windows games without a problem.

EDIT: Forgot to add I’m running an Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB ram, RX 5700XT

EDIT EDIT: +1 for Mint as well. Outside of my gaming PC, it’s my daily driver on my laptop.

They are also strong enough to pull down stray branches stuck in a tree.

I have (more than I’d like to admit) recovered entirely from backups.

I run proxmox, everything else in a VM. All VMs get backed up to three different places once a week, backups are tested monthly on a rando proxmox box to make sure they still work. I do like the backup system built into it, serves my needs well.

Proxmox could die and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. I reinstall proxmox, restore the VMs and I’m good to go again.

I over reacted and took the Linux route. It wasn’t just one thing that prompted the change, but copilot was the icing on the cake.

I’ve been unhappy with windows for a few years, but it’s always been easier to ignore it and continue on. Something in me must have snapped about the same time a few guys at work were talking about gaming on Linux. Worked out well for me, might not work best for everyone.

I did this the moment they dropped copilot on my taskbar without any prompting. It was my gaming machine so it took a little getting used to, but it’s been solid ever since.

I did not ask for an AI chatbot in my os. I don’t want an AI chatbot in my os.

Nothing to hide, but also nothing I want to share either…

This. Smart TV’s are horrible. I want my dumb TV back.

I have everything in its own VM, and Proxmox has a pretty awesome built in backup feature. Three different backups (one night is to my NAS, next night to an on-site external, next night to an external that's swapped out with one at work - weekly). I don't backup the Proxmox host because reinstalling it should it die completely is not a big deal. The VM's are the important part.

I have a mini PC I use to spot check VM backups once a month (full restore on its own network, check its working, delete the VM after).

My Plex NAS only backs up the movies I really care about (everything else I can "re-rip from my DVD collection").