Linux has gotten really good over the last ~15 years. It used to be that if you didn’t have the most up to date packages, you would be missing game changing features. Now, the distribution you use almost doesn’t matter because even the older packages are good enough for most things.

To answer your question, if it weren’t for gaming, no I wouldn’t mind using Debian as my daily driver. If I ever needed a new package for whatever reason, I would use flatpaks, snaps, docker, or Distrobox to get it.

Personally, yeah it’s the old packages. I want to play games on my desktop and have the newest DE features. An arch based distro seems like it’ll keep up better than Debian.

For my servers though, I only use Debian.

I’m assuming you mean LXC? It’s doable but without some sort of orchestration tools like Nix or Ansible, I imagine on-going maintenance or migrations would be kind of a headache.

You might come across docker run commands in tutorials. Ignore those. Just focus on learning docker compose. With docker compose, the run command just goes into a yaml file so it’s easier to read and understand what’s going on. Don’t forget to add your user to the docker group so you aren’t having to type sudo for every command.

Commands you’ll use often:

docker compose up - runs container

docker compose up -d - runs container in headless mode

docker compose down - shuts down container

docker compose pull - pulls new images

docker image list - lists all images

docker ps - lists running containers

docker image prune -a - deletes images not being used by containers to free up space

he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.

Of the two options you gave, I’d go with Mint. If your friend runs into a problem, it would probably be easier to diagnose the issue since it’s just Ubuntu/Debian under the hood.

Once they get used to it, they can try other gaming specific distros if they want to try to get a little more performance.

Should I just learn how to use Docker?

Yes. I put off learning it for so long and now can’t imagine self-hosting anything without it. I think all you have to do is set a static IP to the NIC from your router and then specify the IP and port in a docker-compose.yml file:

Ex: IP-address:external-port:container-port

services:
    app-name:
        ports
            - 192.168.1.42:3000:3000