Linux

If you have little Linux experience it makes no sense to use a niche distribution. You have a lot less people to ask for help, you will find less documentation and support and you will be frustrated really fast, because your niche distribution is doing something different than everyone else, which will break something and you cannot repair it. If you are a beginner go with one of the big ones.

I'd go for Pop if you're new. It's not perfect and System 76 are busy developing their window manager so the distro hasn't seen any major changes since their tiling extension, but it's fairly stable.

I recently had a guest and we wanted to play games. I pulled a 2018 laptop with an NVidia 2060, installed the latest Pop, Steam and we were playing less than an hour later. It works fine.

I use pop to develop in Rust and Kotlin/Android.

I'm not a fan of Gnome but the tiling in pop is good and that's what I still use it.

You can always try more distros in a VM and see if/what you like from others.

Pop. It's what I use on my daily driver Thinkpad with Nvidia built in GPU and it's rock solid. I'm in infosec, run all my businesses, tinker, and game on that laptop, with two extra monitors attached, and it never complains or faulters.

If Nvidia stops being a requirement, I'd probably go pure Debian.

EDIT: I just saw that you are new to Linux. I'm that case, definitely Pop!_OS. Don't get fancy. Just use the latest LTS (long term support) release. In this case 22.04.

I'd personally recommend Garuda, as that's what I've mostly settled with. It's everything I like about arch, but with lots of little changes and utilities that make it both easy to tweak and easy to just use. The built-in btrfs/snapper is particularly nice. I get the whole toy thing though, it doesn't give off the most trustworthy vibes. But if you can look past that it's a great distro. Take a look at the lite edition, it comes without theming and most of the bloat.

When i was still really noob to onward i have jumped from ubuntu, pop os, fedora, linux mint, debian, manjaro, artix, slackware.

I go back between distros from time to time but for a noob and support with out the box experience.

Linux mint is the choice to go, out the box:

• removed ubuntu snaps(snaps seem way too bloated for me)

• nvidia drivers are easy to install via gui

• docs are simple and easy to follow, i had jumped up 2 versions in an old thinkpad w/ nvidia quite easily.

• it does have display refresh rate changes.

• since its based off ubuntu it does have support for games as well.

• really user friendly

Stuff most linux distros have

• tinkering out the box, only a select few remove that to have the distro set to read only for user or are heavily integrated to work a certain way where tinkering is a pain.

• programming-you can setup it however you like for programming, via ide or through text editor such as vim/neovim etc

• vpn remote access for media- its supported in most if not all distros as well.

One thing i want to know is what your computer specs are, since wether a stable distro such as mint or rollin release such as an arch based will depend on your hardware.

Heh welcome!

If I was to give anyone advice it’d be to set up a way to make really solid notes/documentation. Be it a text/markdown file or a google doc. Put down the commands you run, put down the steps and then a link to where you found it. As you muck around and so on you’re going to remember that you wanted to get xyz going and you struggled and you can then refer back to those notes.

That has been the single most valuable thing I’ve learnt from this whole Linux endeavour I’ve been on.

When I reinstall I just follow my notes to get all the devices and so on going. Definitely worth the trouble!

Good luck and tell us how you go!

I just use ubuntu lts with the grafics ppa. It just works and is very well supported by third party vendors. e.g. steam works very well, docker cuda etc is available via ppa.

You can still play around with everything even if some call it Linux for noobs. But I can play with it wonderfully and work (R/Python/cuda/cpp and data science/ml stuff) at the same time without something always breaking or changing. Also, you're most likely to find help and tutorials for ubuntu.

Snaps are annoying but still largely optional. I just replaced Firefox with the deb version via the mozilla ppa. And if snaps are too annoying just use debian.

It is also very practical to know debian/ubuntu because they are the standard systems in companies.

Nobara's probably the "it just works" one for gaming and you can code on pretty much anything

If you want to tinker NixOS is the one imo. Has one config file with fairly simple options like to ensure steam is enabled it's

programs.steam.enable = true;
programs.steam.openFirewall = true:

# nixos-rebuild switch

And it installs and configures everything for you

Also because every time you are rebuilding your system it saves every iteration so if you totally fuck up your system you can just boot an earlier build and away you go

As far as I've used it pretty much everything on NixOS "just works" as long as you've got the right config (which can be searched on search.nixos.org or just googled

If you're arch-curious but want something more opinionated and out-of-the-box, you could have a look at manjaro. It gets much shit thrown its way because its both try-hard (being arch based) and simultaneously "just works", but that's mostly memes