EponymousBosh

Part of the problem is that the “Just Use BSD” Guys are to the FOSS-sphere what the “Just Use Linux” Guys are to the rest of the world.

I see people recommending Debian but you also said you enjoy tinkering, so I’d recommend SpiralLinux. It’s basically Debian but it uses BTRFS so you can roll back to a previous snapshot if you break something. I don’t think Spiral has updated to Trixie yet so you’d need to manually upgrade but that’s not too big a hassle if you do it immediately.

So the NVIDIA graphics card is not as big of an issue as it would have been even five years ago. Just use the proprietary drivers. And for my money, Linux Mint is the best distro for beginners, hands-down. You never have to touch the command line and everything just works.

I second this, with the addition that you can also use DistroSea to test-drive distros in your browser. Also, DistroWatch has a search that you can filter by “Beginners” to find some that might be easier.

California is not the center of the universe, but in the US, a fair amount of companies have to tailor their practices to accommodate California law, because A) it’s so weird a lot of the time, and B) California is huge and rich, so there’s a lot of business to be had. It just makes sense to accommodate the outlier. What happens in California has knock-on effects for the rest of the country, and occasionally the rest of the world; case in point, the recent systemd debacle. It’s not certain that they added the age thing in response to the California law specifically, but it was certainly a factor.

I really loved Garuda but the rolling updates kept breaking my NVIDIA drivers :(

If someone still wants “Arch but also nice,” I’d point them at Garuda tbh. I really liked it but the rolling updates kept breaking my NVIDIA drivers. If not for that I might still be using it.

I feel like you made this chart for me specifically, so thank you

A slightly more positive way of putting this is “choosing the set of problems you want to deal with.” I vastly prefer the problems that Linux hands me over the problems with Windows.

Nah, there was actual effort put into TempleOS.

Yup.

I really liked Garuda but I had to switch because my NVIDIA drivers kept breaking :(

There’s a couple new things being worked on; namely, Wayback and Phoenix.

Here’s the original source, AFAIK: https://www.tumblr.com/sirityzer/708726935428235264/my-brother-commissioned-me-to-make-some-linux

Yeah, KPat just does this. Skip em or persist in your doomed timeline, I guess.

My current and previous laptops were/are Dell and I can count on one hand the number of hardware issues I’ve had with Linux (minus the Nvidia GPU but yknow. Nvidia.)

NVIDIA

Welp, there’s your problem. I have an NVIDIA card as well and it’s been the source of at least 95% of my Linux headaches.

I’ve tried a few distros and Linux Mint was definitely the most “just works” for me. Make sure you’re using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, regardless of what option you choose. Currently I use SpiralLinux (Debian with a few tweaks) because I really like the BTRFS snapshots and fell in love with KDE during my distro-hopping, but Mint is what I would recommend to the vast majority of people.

Seconding (or third-ing, or twelfth-ing) the recommendation for Linux Mint, but also gonna throw one in for MX Linux if the hardware is older.

Mint is a pretty solid choice for like 95% of people. If you’re already using LibreOffice then you’re halfway there, and I’ve been able to run all the games I want through Steam or Lutris (the Flatpak versions are better for compatibility IME). A lot of people use Bottles for games as well, but I’ve never been able to get it to work properly. I think I started using Linux full-time at about the level you seem to be at, and I didn’t run into any major issues.