"Green Is My Pepper"

https://github.com/torvoltos/gimp

Don't use an immutable distro like endless or silverblue. It's a whole new paradigm to learn (in addition to learning Linux basics). You should get your feet wet with something more user-friendly first.

My big recommendation is Ubuntu. Normal ubuntu. Not one of the flavors or derivatives. It's got everything you need, plus very easy to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. Try to avoid using the command line when following guides online, there is nothing on Ubuntu you actually need it for and the graphical tools are very good.

Don't listen to the complaining about snaps. You won't notice them, they won't affect you negatively, they are designed to just set and forget. The complaints come from a highly particular and technical subset of the Linux community.

If you really don't like the look of Ubuntu, then I'd second all the recommendations for Mint. Those two distros have the most number of non-technical users in their communities because they are both very user-friendly and well-tested. I'd recommend against trying anything else until you've gotten comfortable with Ubuntu or Mint.

Couldn't finish it: too much whining, not enough substance.

I haven't tried hyprland yet but if this is the guy developing it than maybe I'm good.

Cosmic seems promising. Best of luck to system76, happy to see an alternative opinionated desktop getting some momentum.

I've given up on GOG. No linux client means the whole process of installing/launching games is rather tedious. Also linux game dependencies can be annoying to resolve

Steam on the other hand just handles everything. If it doesn't work at first, it probably will with proton.

I'd love to support an anti-DRM store, but it's tough when there is so much friction when actually playing the games

One of the best apps on any platform

Somebody has never used opensuse. Zypper is an amazing package manager, one of the best on any distro.

It can handle flatpacks, native packages, and packages from the opensuse build system, keeping everything updated and organized.

Pacman is very basic by comparison, and a lot slower too in my experience.

On KDE Plasma, my only outstanding bug is that the "window shade" button on my window controls is broken. Too bad since I use that feature a lot.

On GNOME everything seems to work as far as I can tell. It's pretty smooth!

Nice job! If you can get the nvidia driver installed properly, any distro should work in theory.

On Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/nvidia-drivers-installation

On Fedora: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht511074-enabling-nvidia-proprietary-drivers-on-fedora-linux

On Pop!_OS it should be already installed by default

I've been hearing good things about Nobara, Ill have to try it out!

LTS kernels aren't more or less stable. Rather, they have been selected by the kernel maintainers to get security fixes backported to them for a certain time.

Ubuntu does the same thing for the kernels on their LTS versions (technically they usually are not LTS kernels since canonical supports them instead of kernel team)

Overall I'd suggest going with what the distro provides unless you have very new hardware, in which case a newer kernel may be required

I don't hate systemd. However:

Units and service files are confusing, and the documentation could be a lot better.

That said, when systemd came out the traditional init stack was largely abandoned. Thanks to systemd (and the hatred of it) there are now a couple of traditional-style init systems in active development.

Stardew Valley is a very relaxing and fun game where you start a farm in a small town. It has also has optional multiplayer. I found it very addictive.

What's the use case? What are you running into that you want to launch as sudo through the gui that isn't pulling up the dialogue automatically?

A few folks have argued this is unnecessary, but I'm curious about your perspective on why and when you think it would be useful