I have an old laptop that I use as a Minecraft server as well as running RPG campaigns during game night. I’m getting tired of Windows 10 and I’m looking for a good replacement. I don’t have a lot of experience with Linux lately, the last time I did anything with it was maybe 10 years or so ago and I used Ubuntu, which I’ve read here is maybe not a good choice any longer. Stats of laptop are below. Recommendations are appreciated, thanks.
Processor Intel® Core™ i7-4800MQ CPU @ 2.70GHz 2.70 GHz Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable) Graphics Card NVIDIA Quadro K2100M (2 GB), Intel® HD Graphics 4600 (113 MB)
Or the current Debian testing, which will become stable soon. If you have experience with a Ubuntu from 10 years ago, you might know about
aptalready. If not, the package manager is already integrated into gnome-software. Additionally you can easily enable Flathub for flatpak and install packages using gnome-software afterwards.And yes, I would avoid Ubuntu on the desktop because of snap and other weird choices for defaults.
On the server however my experiences with Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 were not bad. But if it were my choice I would go Debian stable for servers.
If you want to do less maintenance, Fedora has good defaults and will have major updates twice a year. But, if you don’t want to get custom to new things on your machine that often, Debian is my recommendation.
Only if you have too much time, try Gentoo. I’ve used it for more than 15 years on the desktop besides Debian on Raspberries.