anti-trust authorities

The same anti-trust authorities who have been ignoring <gestures vaguely towards IT industry> completely?

It’s not a dumb question at all, and there is no “agreed upon” definition.

For me the most important characteristics of a “Mainstream Distribution” would be the size of their maintainer team - though that is also inaccurate if we are talking about distributions that are built on top of other distributions - as in your example.

Another indication is to check who is sponsoring a distribution’s development. If there are plenty of commercial sponsors, then chances are that the distribution is well maintained. Similarly, if the distribution is created by a commercial company (Intel, Canonical, RedHat,…), as those companies also have an interest in keeping their product in a good state.

Age of the distribution might be another indicator. If a distribution has been around for a long time, chances are it isn’t bad either.

However, I am lazy and would not actually check any of this by hand. Instead, the thing I would actually do is to just go to https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major and read through their list. 😉

I’d strongly recommend to stick to a mainstream distribution like Fedora, Debian, Mint,…

With bigger distributions you have more people working on them (-> more packages well maintained), you get a bigger community, and therefore it’s easier to get help if anything breaks.

I’m not sure which distribution to recommend though, as they all have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to gaming. Ten years ago I have switched to Gentoo (which is definitely not a distribution for new Linux users) when I got fed up with Ubuntu’s Enshittification, and have stayed there ever since, so I lost a bit track which distributions are good for gaming now and which aren’t.

Quake II RTX is fully raytraced though. I’m not sure how well performance measurements done with it apply to other games that do a mix of raytracing and rasterizing.

Who knew electing fascists would lead to fundamental freedoms being removed?

FIFY