So KDE Plasma is just a graphical environment that you can use on any distro. It’s my preferred desktop environment, but Gnome and XFCE are famous ones, and lots of nerds/programmers love i3 (a tiling graphical environment which encourages you to use keyboard only).

So when choosing a distro, we’re looking at other qualities.

A Linux distro is basically a collection of tools that constitute your OS. The most notable difference between distros is package managrment – how do you install new packages?

This might sound weird but the reason is that open source software comes with tons of different options that can be toggled before compiling to binaries, and at the same time we need our ecosystem of software to play nice accross different packages. They often depend on each other! So that’s why different philosophies split the community into so many different distros.

When installing new software, you essentially run a specific command from the terminal. Your package manager (which is a core part of your distro) then downloads and installs all dependencies. There are graphical tools to help beginners with this, but in fairness I think you should be prepared to learn to use the command line to search for applications and install them. You won’t avoid the terminal as a Linux user.

A really common distro is Debian. It’s the basis for tons of other popular distros, including Ubuntu. My problem with Debian is that they are a bit conservative, which means that they’re often slow with rolling out updates for KDE.

Since I’m also a KDE Plasma person, I run Neon https://neon.kde.org/ which is based on Debian but focuses on rolling out stable updates for KDE packages.

I do not recommend starting with a hobbyist distro like Gentoo, Nix or even Arch if your focus is productivity or gaming. If you want to learn about computers, then those distros can be incredibly rewarding, but they are time-consuming. Go with something Debian-based, or alternatively OpenSUSE or Fedora.

Regarding your other questions, you likely do not need to swap out hardware. But some graphics cards have poor support for Linux, so research your model in advance. You can also try running a distro of your choice live from a USB stick (most distros support this). It’s slower than running from hard drive, but you can get a feeling for what works out of the box and what may need further configuration.

Many games will not work properly on Linux, at least not without extensive tinkering. If you’re serious about certain games, I’d say Windows is unavoidable. I detest dual-booting but if you only have one computer then it may be your only option. However games that work on Deck should work fine on any Linux machine.

Hope this helps.

The best thing to do is just start with whatever you already have. An old gaming rig, laptop or Raspberry Pi, doesn’t matter. Each will present some technical obstacle that you need to overcome (for example keeping the laptop going when the lid is closed). That’s part of learning.

Self-hosting is a hobby where we gradually learn more. Experimentation is just as important as reading the docs.