I have seen a lot of people say they moved from Manjaro to Endeavour (including myself), but I don’t think the two are trying to solve the same thing. Manjaro wanted to create a more stable version of arch (and had some shortcomings that ended up being deal breakers for many people), but endeavour just wants to be a more convenient way to install arch.

I would recommend Fedora, Debian, or Mint. I’ve also heard good things about OpenSUSE.

Also, alternative to running in a VM, put ventoy on a USB drive, then drop isos for all distros on it, and live boot them one after the other to see how you like them.

Opensuse is a good recc. I would go with their slowroll version.

I would personally go with Linux Mint for new users, it’s based on Ubuntu but with ease of use in mind.

Manjaro has had a few flaky things happen with their organisation, so I wouldn’t trust them, Endeavour OS is apparently a decent alternative to them.

OpenSuse is apparently pretty good, am yet to move to Linux for gaming (will next month when I build myself a new machine lol, might go with fedora, which is what I use on my laptop)

My tip would be to make sure of your storage partitioning: Keep all your data entirely separate from system stuff then you can swap out distros pretty much as and when you please. Also: Debian stable, then testing when you’re comfortable

I’ve had Manjaro, and OpenSUSE recommended to me by a friend who likes both of them but he doesn’t game much and doesn’t need various software development tools.

If your friend is familiar around Linux, then I’d advice you to just stick to the distro they’re using themselves. That’s probably the best course of action.

You can check my post history but I’m a dev who also play and had no problem with Linux for years. I don’t play emulation (which is cool, even have a RPi with arcade joystick) but modern games (Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, Ruiner, and some indies) including VR (Half-life: Alyx, Virtual virtual reality, Eye of the template, Cubism, etc) both on desktop and on the SteamDeck. Well it’s been few years and I can tell you the tinker to play ratio is easily 99.9% in favor of playing. I don’t tinker with drivers or anything of the sort (unless I have to work with CUDA, but still then no problem) but it’s true that before buying a game I check ProtonDB to insure it will actually work.

Now in terms of distribution I’m not sure it matters much, what I would though highly recommend is that you make few extra partitions, at least /home this way if you do decide to format (because you somehow broke the OS, want to hop distros, etc) then you will keep you data without having to copy anything on another drive or even slower through the network. It makes changing a breeze.

PS: IMHO as a dev do tinker as much as you need, it’s the best way to learn and see which distro is actually the best for you, just backup your data first then you can go “crazy”, enjoy it’s definitely worth it, even more so as a dev who can at any time say “Oh… that part sucks, I can change it”, it’s literally liberating.

There’s the distro chooser website, but that might be a bit basic for the amount of experience you have: https://distrochooser.de/

I jumped to Linux as a tech savy, Linux beginner and went through a bunch of distros before settling on Opensuse Tumbleweed, and it has been great. Fedora gets mentioned a lot as well but I never got round to trying that. If I were to choose today with a bit more Linux experience, I might choose Endeavour OS.

My understanding is that as far as gaming goes, some distros have some pre-intsalled conveniences, but you could game on any Linux flavour. If it’s just going to be Steam games, then Steam handles Proton and game compatibility itself. It might be worth looking up things like GPU and peripherals compatibility.

I hear Bazzite is good for gaming but I haven’t personally used it.

I use Linux Mint on my machines (except my NAS which has TrueNAS going on it) and I’ve got no complaints so far other than my vertical monitor being a little tough to have a vertical login screen (though that’s so niche it’s barely even worth bringing up) and I’m not even sure that’s an issue on other distros (I don’t distro hop)

My experience with Manjaro is from a decade ago (oh God I’m old) so it really doesn’t apply to anything modern but I have heard it recommended at least a few times and a friend of mine swears by it for everything (he always reminds me it’s based on Arch BTW)

My other friend who uses Linux swears by Pop!_OS and he loves it. I personally don’t really dig the default look of it.

All three of us primarily play indie titles if that makes any difference for you.

Personally I’m moving away from Windows this year (ideally before the end of June) so I’m curious what distros others here recommend as well

I have heard that Nobara Linux is great for gaming but I can not confirm since I use Arch btw

I personally prefer Debian or Linux Mint (Edge edition). They’re very, very solid.

But the real question is, why are you building a new PC? If you already have a PC and you want to leave Windows behind, all you have to do is nuke Windows and install Linux (after trying first a live CD to make sure it works for your computer). You see, if your PC is a bit old, as long as you have 8+ GB of RAM, and a CPU of the last decade, you’re ok with Linux. Linux needs ~1/3 the RAM Windows needs. Only 3D games might require a faster cpu and gpu, but Linux won’t.

I’m very particular to Fedora based distros, mainly because they sort of just work and keep at the cutting edge of the spectrum with little to no headaches.

If you want to go immutable, Bazzite is pretty solid for gaming, so is Kinoite.

But I can also recommend some Ubuntu/Debian based distros, as they are easy to maintain. PopOS and Linux mint are very good options as well. I would also suggest staying away from Ubuntu itself.

I’ve tried some arch based distros over the years, but end up dropping them because I find them unnecessarily convoluted to maintain and troubleshoot, but that’s just me.

To me, a distro doesn’t really matter (unless you’re gonna be gaming), as long as you pick one of the popular ones. It’s the desktop environment that you’ll need to choose. My only advice to you is to go full red with your new PC, AMD all the way. That way, you won’t need to mess with drivers or any of Nvidia’s shenanigans. Everything is baked into the kernel and is plug and play. I write software, too, and I use Endeavour OS, and have been for the last 2.5 years. Not suggesting that you use it (this is something you’ll have to conclude for yourself), but this is what I use and I love it. For gaming, I’d pick a distro that ships new packages (rolling release), so you’re always caught up on the latest improvements for gaming on Linux. We also have distros that are fully dedicated for gaming, like Nobara, Bazzite… Etc.

Debian is pretty good for me. Before I used Debian I ran gentoo from scratch (idk what the newfangled name for that is, but the one where you compile everything). Before that I ran Slackware and before that I ran red hat in like 98-2002.

Set aside some cash for four or five big drives and make your old pc a nas.

You can have it operate as a Time Machine target for your Macs.

The OS on the Steam Deck is Arch based, just like Manjaro, so I imagine it’ll do games.

I’m a fullstack developer as well, and use Arch as my daily driver, and have for the past 9 years. While I can’t speak for Manjaro directly, just the upstream, I have some coworkers that use it without issue. I think it’d be fine for your needs, at least worth trying out. I hear a lot of bleeding edge horror stories thrown around but in that 9 years 95% of problems were of my own doing, and the 5% were easily fixed with a rollback of a package. Out of that, my downtime isn’t worth mentioning it’s so negligible. I feel my coworkers on macos have more issues with major version upgrades by far.

On Arch-based distros, pkgbuild is a great way to handle custom packages when needed, and the AUR is gives me almost everything I need that isn’t in the official repos. It’s a great developer environment.

I’m very interested in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as well, was thinking of trying it out as my next distro on a personal machine to try out something new since I’ve been on a single distro for so long, but not because I need anything new, just sounds like fun.

I always hear amazing things about opensuse. I didn’t like it but I didn’t have any issue with it. Just preferred fedora over it. I’d say give it a shot

Nowadays distro doesn’t really matter. Just pick something that clicks with you. Almost everything is a flatpak now so it’ll install on any distro. If you come across something only packaged for Ubuntu or Debian you can use distrobox.