I’ve been using Linux Mint for the last…eight years? I think? Anyway, it’s been great for gaming and if you want a minimum of fussing about, I would just install Steam and use Proton for compatibility. It’s by far the easiest and most tinker-free gaming experience for Linux - at least in my experience. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to really research and tinker with any annoying issues. protondb.com has been extremely helpful in checking the compatibility of a certain game for Linux and even offers tips and tricks to make the fussier games work.

I am very non-technical and I have ended up with Linux Mint Cinnamon which was the first thing I tried, with Steam dealing with the few games I have played the past four years or so. It has been mostly non-Steam Fallout 4, No Man’s Sky, Baldur’s Gate 3, Guild Wars 2, and Steam version of Lord of the Rings Online. Stability varies but I think it is mostly my hardware being old.

Overall I have used Mint for maybe eight years, at first only for internet browsing. I still played LOTRO and Guild Wars 2 with my trusty (well okay, the games started to be rather crashy) WinXP around 2020. Hm… a year or two, here or there. I don’t actually remember when they started to drop support for XP. I originally tried Steam on Linux for LOTRO.

Just as a background info I’m going to be a little bit dramatic and claim that I don’t like Linux, I use it out of necessity. Even if I am generally fine with it, as far as I can manage it.
I just don’t like the command line at all. I also don’t like the program “shop” like system. I think I can see it on my current Mint as Software Manager, now that I check but I don’t want to start it. It is that I don’t like them “calling homes” or managing things which is how I see the command line and the manager being like.
I can download a Steam installer from the website and then it sets itself up, with command line type window, downloading what ever it likes from somewhere, managing things… fine, I have to deal, I want to play games. For general computer use I can download Firefox and some other Linux software from websites, they start when I click the executable and that’s the way I would like things to work way more. I do let the driver manager set graphics drivers when I make a new Mint installation as I can’t even begin to understand other options.

My favorite thing would be the possibility to easily set up a Linux computer for offline games without ever connecting it to internet.
Once, maybe 4 years ago I did somehow install wine on Debian which I think I didn’t connect to internet in the process. The one game I tested did launch but didn’t really display well because no graphics driver.
Another experiment, on Mint last year, was to install wine with command line (the horror!), I could launch the non-Steam games I installed but didn’t try playing them. I can’t remember for sure but it may be that the games just didn’t run as well as they did on Steam’s Proton on that same Mint installation. Based on when I sometimes read about Linux, wine does seem to need plenty of config which I really don’t want to do.

Just… don’t. Non-technical people should consider consoles, not PCs. Not even with Windows (which is actually harder to use than some Linux distros). If you want to game together with them, just get them an Xbox. It has much more games with cross play than a PlayStation

I’m using ChimeraOS after using Bazzite and running into crashes a lot. It’s been about 2 months but no issues so far. I still search the web for stuff fairly often just because there’s so much you can do, like set up Emudeck, modding games (I’ve been playing FF7 after setting up Seventh Heaven and it’s been pretty fun), and I’ve also added a YouTube TV shortcut that runs in Firefox with uBlock for no ads. At this point I don’t have any complaints about it and it really does feel like a console-like experience.

What distro are you using for gaming?

I use Secureblue, though I’d rather recommend normal Fedora

I started with Bazzite but didn’t like that it was immutable. I broke the permissions on my drive and had to reinstall trying to force it to let me change the login screen background.

After that I switched to Garuda and have had it about a year.

The most painful part was figuring out what Linux uses as app stores and how they work. Bazzite just released Bazaar and I haven’t tried it yet but I hear it works on other distros too. Software installation and management is the biggest hurdle to easy use and that gap is closing fast.

The most common problem I have had is that a Windows app stops working and I try a different version of proton and the problem goes away.

I have only ever had to use the command like when doing weird stuff. Most people won’t need to.

Garuda also has a great helper app that lets you choose common starting software with check boxes, has buttons for updates, firmware, and other common settings, tweaks, and troubleshooting tools. It makes it pretty painless to get started.

Garuda also comes with KDE, Gnome, or Xfce (your choice) so you can get the desktop experience you like.

a gaming system for the kind of person who needs help if their TV is set to the wrong input.

Definitely Bazzite. It’s almost impossible to break, it’s effortless to roll back if something does theoretically go wrong, and KDE Plasma is like the most user friendly version of Windows you’ve never seen.

I’ve been on Pop_OS for 4 years and I’ve used Bazzite and Endeavor on my other computers for a few months. My only issues have been with nvidia drivers (not so much of a problem anymore) and some of the propriety hardware in my laptop being funky. I’d say, honestly, if they can handle Windows they can probably handle any mainstream distro. If all they use is Steam and a browser, anything will suffice. I’d personally lean toward Bazzite as I doubt they can break it and it comes set up for gaming already. If they game with anything outside Steam, teach them how to use Lutris. The Bazzite forums and wiki pages are also great, albeit some are a bit technical, although I doubt they’ll need it if they are very tech illiterate anyway.

How possible is that they will be needing some bleeding edge update of WINE or kernel?

If you think you can expect that they won’t need to do bleeding edge updates, pick something that is easy to use for you and just choose a WM that will be easy for them

My grandma and mom use Manjaro with XFCE. Or rather they use XFCE, I use Manjaro on their PCs ;D. They don’t need to update to, for example, NTSync enabled version ASAP, so it’s fine with me just doing an update during some holidays for grandma and over the phone for mom.
We used to try Mint for their boxes. I was banging my head against it as always with Debian based distros and the effect was that for them the downtimes were longer. Despite our mutual hopes, mom never really got self-sufficient with managing the OS. Even with GUI based package manager. So I just migrated them to Manjaro and now we are all happier. For me the updating is less painful and is faster, for them it just works

But if you would need to educate such user on how to use some package manager to update something, then maybe there might be some differences between GUI package managers that might help you
although

for someone who doesn’t know how to do much more than check their email and log in to Steam

I think it will be you doing the updating in the end

Linux gaming has gotten really good and continues to get better. Currently, I’d agree with what most of the other responses here have been and say Mint or Pop!_OS

This doesn’t help for the current build you’re setting up and I’m not suggesting to wait for it, but for the future I’d suggest also to keep an eye on SteamOS and when Valve eventually releases it for people to just download and install on whatever machine, it’s likely going to be the best option for this kind of scenario

I’ve been using Zorin OS for about 6 months (first on my laptop and now on my newly bought gaming desktop) and I’m very happy with it! Didn’t really have any big issues (so far) with compatibility. I also find it very user friendly in terms of Windows lookalike. Gaming wise, I’ve been using heroic games launcher for non steam games and steam for steam games and I have to say I didn’t expect it to be so easy and straightforward

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I’ll second Linux Mint Cinnamon. My understanding is it is designed to look/function as close to Windows as possible to help people transition away from Windows.

It was my first Linux distro migrating from Windows, and overall it’s been a fairly decent transition.

1. Linux Mint Cinnamon
2. About 2, maybe 3 years. Time’s a bit fuzzy.
3. There was some, I’ll leave some tips below.
4. Nothing specific.

-Check out Protondb.com. It’s a website where you can search for games to see their compatibility rating with Linux OSes, along with any tinkering/troubleshooting tips other users have done.

-Once you install Steam, go to the Settings menu, select Compatibility, and select an option for “Default compatibility tool”. This global setting means you would not have specifically select a Proton version for each game you play.

-I found that sometimes Steam would not launch from the toolbar. I have no issues launching it from the terminal window (literally launch Terminal, type the word ‘steam’, and hit Enter)

Personally I’d say none of the above for newbies. I have had experience with Nobara and it’s OK but I literally had problems with GPG certificates for updates for the second time in 3 months, and yesterday the update engine crashed during an update and my plasma desktop only showed a black screen with a cursor on it when I logged in.

I can problem solve that but it’s annoying as hell and not suitable for someone who doesn’t want to do that.

Pick a more mainstream distro and not something that is rolling release. They don’t need that - they need something that is rock solid. The gaming modifications on distros are overrated - they only matter if you really want to push things to the limit.

I’d probably go with Mint for your scenario. It’s stable, and the 22.1 is a long term release up to 2029 - so it’s unlikely to break with a major update.

I’d personally go with KDE over cinnamon - it’s user friendly but its slicker than the default desktops in Mint and will make the machine feel more high end as a gaming machine. There is also scope to customise it if the person using that wants to go down that route or has something they’re already familiar with (KDE very flexible - feels like a nicer version of windows GUI by default but can make it look like MacOS or even Gnome, or whatever you want tbh). Cinnamon and Mate have flexibility too but KDE has a whole ecosystem of software to draw on and doesn’t suffer from Gnomes rather marmite design philosophy.

In terms of games - use Steam where possible. It’ll “just work”. There is almost no configuration required and personally I have a huge games library and haven’t had to troubleshoot anything so far. I don’t play competitive games or the highest end fps games though. But I’ve just completed cyberpunk 2077 on my desktop, which is a 3070 and had no issues.

Some popular games like Minecraft have their own clients and set up but it’s not difficult to set up once and leave it going.

Lutris is a good games client if they do have games in other stores like GOG or Epic, and it works well with steam too. Heroic is also a good multi store client - slick and easy to use if that’s preferred, good for gog, Epic and amazon.

Whatever you chose to do, keep.ot simple. I’d honestly avoid the gaming distros and go for something stable and widely support like Mint. Definitely avoid pure Ubuntu, and avoid rolling releases of anything and you should be fine support wise.

1. Nixos!
2. Couple years, but more than 15 years total on Linux in general.
3. Multiple times a day. Not a beginners distro for sure.
4. Nope, I love it.

So don’t use nixos :P but bazzite is great! Or mint, my mom uses mint.