That’s not how it works. Ubuntu adds layers of hardware support and software tweaks on top of its Debian base. Same goes for Mint on top of Ubuntu.

I’m really fond of the Aspire 15 at the moment. You can get them without any preinstalled OS, which is perfect if your goal is to run Linux on them, since you won’t be paying any hidden costs for a Windows license you never intended to use anyway.

I’ve had very disappointing experiences with Lenovo laptops in general and they’re not cheap, even when bought second hand. My recommendation? Go for an AMD Acer laptop, they’re very good machines and Linux Mint works out of the box in all laptops I’ve tested it so far. And I’m sure there are other affordable / good OEMs out there.

Why?

Not directly, I’m just giving OP the answer they wanted:

The quick and dirty questions is: Which distro should I try next?

Give Linux Mint a spin, I seriously doubt there’s a friendlier distribution for newcomers from Windows.

This comment won’t fix it for you, but I can definitely relate to what you’re saying. I’ve spent so much time optimizing my web games in a way that they run more-or-less consistently the same in any modern browser, it was probably as much work as it was put in the games themselves. I do maintain my own engine, so I was aware of the cost.

The thing is, now Firefox is officially one of the last browsers employing their own rendering engine. The other one is probably Safari. I’m not aware of any others that do that. All other major browsers are using Chromium under the hood, and we know how this industry ruthlessly optimizes things for popularity. I won’t delve into how many software layers of responsibility are involved in playing a video game in a web browser. My point is, if something is “passable” for a couple popular browsers, very few people will bother with checking why the less popular ones might have some sub-par performance.

Kindness wins.

The Go programming language allows developers to fetch modules directly from version control platforms like GitHub.

This is absolutely not just specific to Go.

Tab groups have always been there. They’re called windows.

As an early Linux adopter who tried everything under the Sun, I can only say that Mint is absolutely awesome.

Gimp, Oh my ZSH and VS Code.

I meant that as a humorous wish. Apparently it didn’t work.

Because it’s fine the way it is. They can ask newbie questions over there, while we try to have more interesting discussions over here. /s

It seems the other answers already covered what you needed to know, so I won’t be redundant here. Pro tip: if you rarely use your Windows installation, you might consider moving it into a virtual machine that you can conveniently boot from within your running Linux system. This way you wouldn’t need the dual boot anymore, which might be desirable for various reasons.

Slackware back in '96 when It was the only option. Then tried everything else before settling on Mint and never having to worry about picking another distribution again.

I feel you and that’s the main reason why I eventually give up on Linux discussion groups. “Is Linux ready”? Yeah, it’s been ready for decades now. I sometimes wonder if these annoying posts are just FUD coming from Apple and Microsoft.

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I’ve got Dark Souls and Sniper Elite 2. Both games seem decent so far.

Sorry for the spoiler. You will meet Orochi again.