Personally, I’d just try live boot usbs instead of going to the effort of setting up VMs for different distros.
For getting images, my approach would be to search for the distro name to find its website and look for their downloads page. If there’s multiple flavours, just pick one and see how you like it. You can always switch to a different one once you’ve got enough experience to decide what is and isn’t important for you.
If you just want to game, Fedora was pretty easy to get going for me. I just installed that and then steam and was able to play games after that. I’ve got an AMD gpu and it was actually easier than on windows, since you still need to install gpu and chipset drivers on windows. The only time I spent on that in Fedora was the time it took to figure out I didn’t need to do that.
Only parts that took a little digging was mounting my other partitions (I think because I misunderstood some setup during the install, but it ended up being no big deal) and finding the setting that enabled all games to be attempted to run with proton, since by default steam will only show games with official linux support as playable by default.
Also getting sound working the way I wanted it to was a bit of a hassle, though any of the workarounds I tried worked pretty quickly. I wanted to use the optical digital, but it wouldn’t at first, but sound did work from the analog port as well as plugging my soundbar in via USB. And even though I gave up on getting the digital to work at the time because I just wanted to play a game, when I later swung back to it, it just worked, so I’m guessing it was just broken because my motherboard was a new one and the software needed to be updated to properly support it.
Personally, I’d just try live boot usbs instead of going to the effort of setting up VMs for different distros.
For getting images, my approach would be to search for the distro name to find its website and look for their downloads page. If there’s multiple flavours, just pick one and see how you like it. You can always switch to a different one once you’ve got enough experience to decide what is and isn’t important for you.
If you just want to game, Fedora was pretty easy to get going for me. I just installed that and then steam and was able to play games after that. I’ve got an AMD gpu and it was actually easier than on windows, since you still need to install gpu and chipset drivers on windows. The only time I spent on that in Fedora was the time it took to figure out I didn’t need to do that.
Only parts that took a little digging was mounting my other partitions (I think because I misunderstood some setup during the install, but it ended up being no big deal) and finding the setting that enabled all games to be attempted to run with proton, since by default steam will only show games with official linux support as playable by default.
Also getting sound working the way I wanted it to was a bit of a hassle, though any of the workarounds I tried worked pretty quickly. I wanted to use the optical digital, but it wouldn’t at first, but sound did work from the analog port as well as plugging my soundbar in via USB. And even though I gave up on getting the digital to work at the time because I just wanted to play a game, when I later swung back to it, it just worked, so I’m guessing it was just broken because my motherboard was a new one and the software needed to be updated to properly support it.