Zorin OS is a good first option. Everything Just WorksTM

A good starting point is the pinned post “Understanding Linux and choosing your first Linux distro, v2.0”. In doubt, just take something like Linux Mint as a general operating system or a gaming oriented one like Bazzite.

Just mint or fedora, you’ll be fine.

I’ve been using bazzite with an nvidia card for almost a year. No issues.

nvidia is not that bad on linux anymore. all people usually have is small annoyances, big issues are uncommon on major distros.

debian probably works. but if you want the best performance and games, newer packages are usually better, yes.

I use debian with Nvidia graphics. The drivers are available in the repos and work fine

I’d go catchy just for the bootloader btrfs support. If you fuck something up just go to your last image and its not fucked up anymore. Basically save states for learning linux

Between linux distros on the same kernel and a similar DE setup the difference in performance between them is within the margin of error. If it’s greater than that then something is broken with the setup. You’ll likely get worse performance and hardware compatibility on debian or mint, just because they run older kernels by default. You can get newer kernels backported to debian if you add the right repositories, but I don’t think it’s recommended.

I run the desktop version of bazzite and can not say enough good things about it. It’s been more stable than debian for me and the “immutible” distros i’ve been on have been such a good and trouble-free experience that I don’t want to touch traditional distros anymore. It has all the codecs and a bunch of extra hardware support enabled by default, a bunch of scripts to easily set up things, and a bunch of QoL improvements set up on install. Having to open up flatseal every now and then to grant permissions to a flatpak is so much less trouble than what I’ve experienced on traditional distros where updates can straight up break shit and randomly send you on a troubleshooting goose chase. I don’t understand how anyone finds that normal and acceptable. You can get local AI set up pretty easily with the right flatpaks (alpaca) or certain appimages.

If not being able to mess with system level stuff, or the niche quirks of an immutable distro are a dealbreaker, or you want to jump around on different DEs and not mess with a VM: Fedora is good, generally stable and decently updated packages. Mint generally stable but might have slightly older packages. CachyOS for an arch based option that’s highly regarded, because it has a lot of useful options, but with rolling release distros the risk of updates causing an issue slightly higher than usual. I’ve also heard nothing but good things about OpenSuse Tumbleweed which is also rolling release but reportedly very stable.

did this happen to be from the radio free asia sale?

Get Arch on there if you’re looking for bleedng edge, no bloat performance.

The wiki has some points on nvidia drivers too

Endeavouros has nvidia included