[godelski]

Generally I recommend people use PopOS. It's well suited for laptops, as that's what System76 is focused on a they're shipping laptops with Nvidia GPUs. I personally prefer Arch based distorts like endeavor but even with wide community support it's just more likely a noob will face an error. Fwiw I've only faced one meaningful error in the last 3 years in endeavor but I've also been daily driving Linux for 15 years now

[rubyn00bie]

I’ve been using PopOS for the last five years and while I generally agree… the latest release using Cosmic by default has a lot to be desired. Cosmic will eventually be good but right now it’s far from it and I had to install Gnome as a stop gap just to have a functional desktop environment. I’ll probably ditch PopOS for Arch + KDE but I haven’t had the time to do so yet for my workstation.

Truly, and to really drive it home, I’ve loved PopOS but this latest release is just too half baked. I think anyone considering it should either wait a year or use something else, and Kubuntu seems like a reasonable alternative for people coming from Windows or MacOS.

[godelski]

That's unfortunate to hear.

I'd give kde a shot. It's been my preferred DE for years. But check out the below wiki and poke around for what your style is. The beauty of linux is adapting to you and switching DEs is a quick change (you do not need to change your DM to change your DE).

If you're interested on Arch then give something like EndeavourOS a shot. Cachy is getting popular these days too but I haven't used it. But I feel its going to be as easy as using Endeavour or Manjaro and those are very convenient distros for Arch with direct Nvidia GPU support. Though if you want you learn Linux I suggest going Vanilla Arch. You'll learn a lot from the install process (it isn't uncommon to mess up. You won't brick anything and learning about the chroot environment will help you in the future of you do mess things up)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_environment