Sophienomenal

Honestly, my recommendation for new users who are into gaming is Bazzite. Just install everything through the software store and it just works. Well, everything that’s available as a flatpak at least. Steam comes preinstalled, as do all the drivers (among some other various gaming-oriented things like kernel optimizations and Lutris), so it’s basically just install and done. The software store, Bazaar, will find basically anything a normal user needs. The nice thing about atonic distros is that you generally don’t need to do anything through the command line,as installs are perfectly consistent across all computers (so no random things breaking in the background without someone else noticing and either filing a bug report for you in the beta, or fixing the issue outright). After over a decade of Linux use, I’ve never found an easier distro. I honestly have switched to it as my main distro because I love Fedora, and the atomic features are nice (and Bazzite is just a little nicer for my use case than Kinoite).

When I set someone up with Bazzite, I just tell them to install everything through the software store, and I rarely get questions other than “how do I install this software that isn’t available on Linux”, which I usually meet with a recommendation for an alternative, or if it’s really critical, I’ll have them install through Bottles or something. I always mention the “no Adobe or Autodesk” caveot before they install, so I never really get questions about that except for “well, what would you recommend I use instead?”

As to answer your questions directly:

1. It is very common, so you can find Bazzite specific answers,
2. As far as I’ve used it (which is a couple years now) things never break, so finding solutions that work in other distros doesn’t tend to apply for me (except for when I want to make custom scripts like when I bound a mouse button to hard mute and unmute my mic, though I just had to look up generic Pipewire stuff)
3. Everything installs as a flatpak, so selinux is essentially completely unnoticed. I’ve never had a single issue with selinux and I’m a power user. I’ve used Fedora-based distros for many years and only ever encountered selinux issues on my server, and that was for low-level processes that aren’t relevant to desktop use (for instance, setting up NUT to automatically power off all devices on my network during a power outage when the UPS battery is low)

I use Bazzite as my only desktop OS at the moment (I have multiple headless servers with either Fedora or Debian), and have been using Fedora atomic for awhile before that. I noticed no significant change in general purpose computing when switching from Fedora atomic (Kinoite) to Bazzite, other than all the non-free codecs and drivers I would have installed in Fedora already being present in Bazzite. If anything, that improved my experience. I don’t even game much, it’s just something I do occasionally, though I’ve been using Linux exclusively for over a decade now, so I can’t say I get frustrated enough fixing minor things that I’d really remember things that are easy for me to fix, but potentially difficult for someone new to fix. Honestly, the only time I’ve really had to fix stuff in my recollection is from bash scripts I wrote in other distros no longer working, and since it’s atomic, I chose to rewrite for the tools available instead of layering unnecessary packages. Certainly not something I’d imagine someone new doing.

As far as most software goes, you install it via Flatpak, so the experience should be identical across different distros.

Bazzite is just Fedora Atomic with extra things slapped on top (Nvidia drivers if u have an Nvidia card, kernel tweaks for gaming, Steam and Lutris preinstalled, etc.). It functions just as well as a normal desktop as any other distro. It’s also my default recommendation for anyone that plans on doing any gaming, where my recommendation for complete non-gamers is Fedora Atomic, which is what it’s based off. Since it is Atomic (the root file structure is kept consistent across all installs, and updates aren’t applied while the system is running), it’s very resilient and reliable. If anything ever does break (which won’t happen under normal conditions), then you can revert to the previous version from the boot menu and restore it, then either try to update again, or wait a bit before you upgrade if you suspect the issue was a bad update or something. All you need to know is that is called a rollback, and you should be able to find all the information you need about how to do it via a quick search. I can tell you to memorize sudo rpm-ostree rollback, but chances are you would rather look it up in case you remembered wrong anyway.

For people coming from Windows, I recommend the KDE Plasma version, as the UI is more Windows-like than GNOME, so it’s a smoother transition. It isn’t like GNOME is difficult to learn or anything (it’s likely what you used with Ubuntu), it’s actually simpler, it’s just very opinionated and differs in design philosophy from both Windows and KDE Plasma. You can always feel free to look into the differences on your own by watching videos, as they show off the desktop environments more than text ever could.

EDIT: For game compatibility, I’d recommend checking https://protondb.com/ (for games without anti-cheat) and https://areweanticheatyet.com/ (for games with anti-cheat). Note that it’s very often that anti-cheat works in WINE/Proton, but the developers go out of their way to detect that it’s running in Linux and explicitly block it. This is not the fault of Linux, or some compatibility issues, it’s an explicit blacklist.

If you want the easiest experience possible with Nvidia, I’d recommend Bazzite (and go with the KDE Plasma version). It comes with everything preinstalled and consistent across installations. Plus, it’s a tank when it comes to stability; very hard to break it due to the atomic nature. Just install everything through the built in store and you’ll be fine. Installing programs is much easier than Windows in Linux due to easy software stores. Bazzite currently uses Bazaar as its software store.

I’ve run Nvidia with Wayland for years and never encountered a single issue. This sounds like it’s probably just an Ubuntu issue (go figure, there’s a reason the Linux community despises Canonical). It’s worked perfectly fine for me in Fedora and Arch in Wayland, and my distro of choice nowadays is Bazzite, which is based on Fedora.

I don’t have experience with mobile Linux (still on Android), but you can emulate Android apps through Waydroid and that would (probably) work. Granted, Idk if notifications would work, but that’s an option if mobile Linux can handle Waydroid. There’s also Molly, which is a signal client that doesn’t rely on Google Play Services for notifications.

I second that Nvidia is fine on Linux. I have an Asus gaming laptop with an Nvidia card that I use daily with no issues whatsoever, including in games (though do keep in mind some anticheat games blacklist Linux; that is not a compatibility issue, it is a conscious choice by the game makers, so not the fault of Linux). I recommend that anyone who is thinking about installing Linux checks their frequently played games on https://www.protondb.com/, and check any games they plan to buy there before purchasing them.

I’d also like to make a recommendation for a distro. If you want the easiest, practically no way to break it distro, I’d recommend Bazzite. You can select an option on download that includes the Nvidia drivers in the install so there are no extra steps to install them. It’s about as easy as it gets for gaming on Linux (it even comes with Steam preinstalled!). Find it at https://bazzite.gg/. It’s always what I recommend for Windows gamers thinking about switching to Linux (and choosing the KDE Plasma image bc it’s more Windows-like than GNOME). The other great part is that it’s immutable, so there is consistency across installs, it’s much harder to accidentally break, and you can roll back to a previous version in the bootloader if anything does break. Most things a person will want to install can be found in Flathub via the Discover app (or sometimes an AppImage), so most people wouldn’t really need to mess with rpm-ostree package overlays (tho they really aren’t difficult, but only use them as a last resort since it often makes updates a lot slower). I personally think that atomic distros are the most newcomer-friendly option out there. They just work, and they do so consistently. Unless you mess with package overlays, your exact root filesystem will be tested before an update is pushed, and bugs that do show up will typically be found quickly and fixed quickly due to the fact that the same bug will likely happen for everyone else (the exception is hardware-based or firmware-based issues, of course).

Just my 2 cents, having switched to Bazzite after over a decade on Linux, from Linux Mint, to Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Void, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Kinoite.

Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut has worked well for me. A quick Google search shows a standard AMD AM5 CPU IHS is 32×32mm, and the normal recommendation for that is a pea sized dot in the center. Given that you’re talking about a laptop CPU, the exposed die will be significantly smaller. A delidded i7-8700k, for instance, is 9.2x16.7mm, which is only 15% of the area, so you would use roughly 15% of a pea of thermal paste for that die size. Granted, I don’t know the actual die size of an i7-7500U, so take that with a grain of salt.

Here is an iFixIt guide on how to repaste a laptop. Do not forget to remove the old thermal paste (and do so with a lint free cloth)! They recommend using an amount of thermal paste the size of a grain of rice. That seems a little small to me, but then again, I only paste desktop processors. I expect someone else here may have more experience with laptops.

I can’t help with pirating software, your options are going to be heavily limited because most people running Linux would just prefer open source alternatives (like Blender), so it’s far less likely you will find cracked software specifically made for Linux (plus, there is a far smaller userbase). On some quick searching, I did find someone who had issues running Houdini in a VM (for multiple distros), but it worked fine when it was installed natively. I’m not seeing an entry in the WINE database for Houdini, so while you could always try running a Windows version through WINE, given the type of program it is, I highly doubt it would run without issue. I have no recommendations on how to get ahold of a Linux compatible version without a license.

virt-manager is my go-to. There’s also Gnome Boxes, but I’ve never used it myself. virt-manager is the best I’ve tried, personally. Both use KVM, so they should be much more resource efficient