You may need to try a few to make the most of your hardware config. Make a few bootable USB drives, and spend an evening trying your options I’d say at least pop!os, manjaro and nobara to cover the main distro bases. But everything is pretty good these days and everything has corner cases that cause trouble.

I would personally recommend popos or mint. I have varying amount of experience with the others.

Bazzite is very hyped on Lemmy, I don’t quite understand how it works, it seems good for what it is, but I don’t know if I would recommend it as someone’s first Linux daily driver.

Manjaro seems great most of the time, until the maintainers mess something up and royally screw up your system. But that’s just things I’ve heard, your milage will vary.

Nobara worked really well for me, but ultimately I wasn’t very comfortable to use a distro maintained by one guy, even if that guy is glorious egg roll.

I personally use popos. I wish it was fedora based like Nobara, but you can’t have it all. Wow works straight out the box. There are appimages or deb packages for warcraft logs and curse as well, so they work fine.

I personally (I’m sure others will disagree) would recommend skipping Manjaro and maybe Pop.

If you want to try Arch based pick Endeavor instead of Manjaro.

It seems like new folks have a lot of trouble with Pop to me. Out of the Ubuntu-based side I’d choose Mint over the rest.

Also don’t discount base Debian, people sneer at it because of the speed of the update cycle but the other side of that is it being the least likely to blow up on a new user.

Full disclosure: My devices are currently split between endeavor and Debian, depending on my tolerance for things breaking. I know fuck all about Bazzite/Nobara/Fedora.

I’d say stick to what you know. So one of the Debian or Ubuntu based distros. Like Ubuntu, Mint or Pop OS.

Stay away from Valve’s Debian based SteamOS. That is horribly outdated and has nothing to do with what people nowadays mean when they say “SteamOS”. I’m always surprised to learn that it’s still available.

In the end it doesn’t really matter which distro you choose. All of them should have no problems with running WoW.

I’ve played WoW on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. No problems there.

Nvidia graphics is terrible on Linux you need to switch, honestly use Linux mint, it feels like windows and makes it easy to switch

Admittedly, I’m probably not the best person to ask for recommendation of a noob-friendly distro, but I feel people are overthinking this. If someone produces a list which includes distros I’ve never heard of, I think they spent too much time on ‘Top 10 Noob Friendly Distros in 2025’ websites.

If you really care about my recommendation, just start with Mint.

First, gaming distros are vanilla distros with opinionated tweaks and additions to support the hobby of gaming. It might be as simple as having Steam pre-installed to as complex as having unique kernels or custom package repos maintained by the distro maintainers.

But that doesn’t mean vanilla is always the best choice, because not everybody wants to spend time optimizing everything. Some distros even have easy setup scripts for otherwise complex installations (like for Davinci Resolve). Don’t feel like you need to pick vanilla to be a “true user.”

Some easy to set up Distros for gaming that are ready ootb:

• Bazzite: Fedora Atomic, practically bulletproof, just works. Downsides are that adding new packages is not the same as other distros, and there’s a learning curve to it beyond flatpaks. Some software can’t be installed at all if it doesn’t come as an RPM or AppImage (Private Internet Access’s VPN client, for example).

• CachyOS: Arch with an optimized kernel and optimized packages. Comes with some easy-install scripts. Tool to easily select different kernels and schedulers. Currently another very popular choice. Like the above, this just works. There’s some debate about how significant the optimizations really are, but they’re there nonetheless.

• Nobara: Traditional Fedora. Like Bazzite, just works. Has a custom update manager that acts as a GUI wrapper for your usual cli tools. Maintained by GloriousEggroll, a widely respected user that maintains the GE versions of Proton.

• PikaOS: Debian (not Ubuntu). Combines the philosophies of Nobara and CachyOS and puts them atop Debian. Better setup scripts than even CachyOS, a more user friendly update tool than Nobara’s, and has the same kernel selection and scheduler tools as CachyOS, plus the same package optimizations. Don’t let the fact that it’s Debian underneath fool you. This has the latest kernel and drivers.

I would try all of those in a VM and see what you like about them. They’re all unique and worth a look.

ETA: all of these have Nvidia versions, so all of them should work with your card.

wow is one of the easiest things to run and has ran pretty much fine since it came out in 2004 lol

The newer battle net launcher is more difficult to run, but lutris auto installs all that for you.

Try each for a week. Go through the installs. Set up a thing and do a update.

Make notes! I can’t stress this enough, want to actually learn a bit make a small note on why you like what you like and why you don’t. Ease of install, ease of finding support, ease of updating, and so on.

Shrug I distro hopped a lot. Tried a bunch before I stick with arch. Even did manjaro and ubuntu.

The beauty of linux is there’s a lot of options and choices.

I just rebuilt my wife’s old Dell laptop (AMD with a super generic Intel on-board GPU). It’s now running Debian stable + KDE and WoW installed easily under Lutris (start with their Battle.net wizard). Diablo III runs as well, but with some weird grphical glitches. Wife thinks they’re cool tho, so I stopped trying to fix it. Anyway, WoW seems playable enough for her, though super crowded towns like Orgramar (sp?) occassionally crash the game.

I ran WoW for years on Arch until I stopped playing a few years ago. IDK what the experience is like these days, but it was fine then.

Personally, since I don’t like the runaround to install things on Bazzite, I would use Nobara or just vanilla Fedora with your own drivers. You can use Btrfs Assistant to set up Snapper snapshots and boot entries if you want, but I’ve never seen a Fedora update fail in any critical way. Frankly, I’d be inclined to just go with vanilla Fedora since GloriousEggroll is a busy guy and updates aren’t very up to date on Nobara IME.

Im personally on pop!_os, though im not sure how much I’d recommend it at the moment as they’re building up to launching their new DE, which probably isn’t gonna be the most stable

Mint is a good “default” newbie distro :3 zorinOS is another one I see mentioned a lot these days though I’ve not personally tried it

Like others have mostly said, Mint is a great choice.

All the different distros can basically all do the same things for the most part. The main differences between them are mostly philosophical and don’t matter to a new user.

Once you get comfortable with linux, you can easily switch to a different distro if you get annoyed with something.

For now, just choose a popular distro that you think has a nice user interface.

I think mint, popos, and Ubuntu are all great choices.

I play both Classic and Retail on Pop!_OS using Lutris. Chose Pop! because my machine has an RTX 3090. The setup was super easy, and I actually get better overall performance than I did on Windows.