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MintLinux and Pop!OS are normally the two front-runners for new users. Basically, if you use Steam and you don't play online-only games with bad implementations of anti-cheat software, you are good to game on either.
Make a USB that you can "live boot" from, so you can test out how they work with your hardware. Generally spearking, Mint works better with AMD, and Pop! works better with Nvidea.
Here’s the official basic guide for Mint:
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
And here’s the official basic guide for Pop!:
https://support.system76.com/articles/install-pop/
Do Pop!_OS AND Linux Mint have KDE Plasma variants, for newcomers who don't know how to swap desktop environments?
I don't think they do. But once you've already started looking into swapping the desktop environment from whichever is the default, I don't think you can call yourself a newcomer anymore.
Well, yes, that's why I asked. Some newcomers to linux find Plasma more familiar than GNOME et al. Having it preinstalled can help them get comfortable faster, with less effort.
Wanting a windows-like environment makes sense. It's not specifically Plasma, but Mint has Cinamon which is very Windows-like.
I was a Win XP/7 user that bought a laptop with Windows 8.1, emigrated to Linux, and found that Cinnamon felt more like Windows to me than Windows did.
No; Linux Mint used to offer a KDE variant but have stopped; Linux Mint is the showcase distro for the Cinnamon DE, so obviously they have that, it is my understanding that Clem is active with the MATE team as well, so Mint MATE edition is a thing, and they also offer xfce as their lightweight offering.
Pop!_OS has their (IMO) godawful Gnome fork that they're turning into their own thing, and that's IT. They offer instructions on installing other DEs, which I tried once. I managed to install a very unpolished, ugly and feature incomplete version of Mint that broke flatpak somehow.
So if you really want KDE, just install a distro that ships it, like KDE Neon, Kubuntu or Fedora KDE Spin.
I was using Mint with my Nvidia GPU for a while but found that games felt very laggy. Not sure what was going on but I switched to Kubuntu and that seemed to resolve the issue. (I assume the problem was something to do with cinnamon).
I like KDE and feel like the tools are more mature than they are in gnome or cinnamon anyway. Snaps are annoying but are fairly easy to avoid.
My vote is for Kubuntu for new users.