When choosing a linux distribution, or a desktop environment, or anything really, go with the most popular, “basic” choice. Because when you have questions and need to search them, the more popular stuff is 99.9% guaranteed to have the answer to your question on some stackoverflow thread, or the arch linux wiki (which is pretty much just “the linux wiki” at this point).

Also, asking AI for help (chatgpt, phind, etc) is surprisingly helpful.

I think most of the games I’ve liked lately are roguelites:

• Bullets Per Minute
• Crypt of the Necrodancer
• Plate-Up
• Unrailed
• Noita
• Risk of Rain 2

Except for BPM and Noita, I’d recommend all of these as excellent coop games too. Here are some summary descriptions:

Bullets Per Minute:

• first-person shooter dungeon crawler
• awesome rock soundtrack with a steady beat
• you have to shoot and reload to the beat

Crypt of the Necrodancer:

• top-down 2d dungeon crawler
• awesome electronic soundtrack with a steady beat
• you have to attack and move to the beat

Plate-Up:

• top-down 2d restaurant simulator
• episodic gameplay where you try to make it through each day by serving all the customers
• if any customer waits too long, you lose
• inevitably gets crazy and chaotic, perfect for a group looking for a hectic and fun coop game
• devs are based, epic mod support

Unrailed:

• top-down 2d rail-building game
• you start with a train on some rails, with the train always moving forwards
• the goal is to continuously place rails in front of the train, otherwise you lose
• similarly to Plate-Up, incredibly chaotic energy, very fun

Noita:

• sidescrolling dungeon crawler
• you mainly fight enemies using wands and spells
• wands on their own are effectively just a bunch of empty slots; you decide which spells go in them, and in which order
• this may or may not eventually result in game-breaking shenanigans (or suicidal shenanigans, or both)
• there are a lot of secrets. like the entire game is a meta-narrative about discovering secrets. question everything.
• you will die. a lot. half the time to your own wacky spells. this is the way.

Risk of Rain 2:

• 3rd-person shooter (some characters are primarily melee, but whatever lol)
• game consists of a series of stages, each of which has a bunch of enemies, a bunch of chests with items, and a boss you must defeat to progress further
• also has a decent few secrets. Not on the same scale as Noita, but still quite a few

Actually, I haven’t gotten around to trying Wayland yet! Mostly because i3 on X11 works well enough for me already.

I mean, I literally just plugged in my monitor, then went into Arandr and dragged the funny rectangles a little.

Edit: For reference, my multi-monitor setup is literally just 2 monitors side by side. In my case, I did have to change some settings, specifically set the left one as primary rather than the right one, and make them tile in a slightly different way. But I wouldn’t say it involved any “jank” — just some configuration, same as it would on any other OS. (Specifically, I dual-boot windows 10 for some rather silly reasons, and I found the multi-monitor configuration process very comparable in terms of jank or complexity.)

I’m not sure what your experience has been like, but for me it’s been basically plug-and-play.