True, but not things you will use day to day. With such a little machine, I would go with EndeavourOS with i3 or sway and build it up from there.

The only disadvantage is that you have to manually update, unless you’ve installed it from the aur.

Isn’t Zorin very out of date?

If you’re supporting it, then one you are familiar with would be my recommendation. If you’re both beginners, then Mint.

On EndeavourOS, you just have to run nvidia-inst. Mint has the driver manager, and other distros have ways of handling it. For your card, you’ll want the Nvidia Open driver if it doesn’t do it automatically.

TLDR: These days it’s easy.

Out of date Nvidia drivers was the main reason I moved from Tumbleweed to EndeavourOS, at the time they were a couple of generations behind and didn’t even have explicit sync.

When installing on Arch (or a derivative) you should run sudo pacman -Syu package_name so it is always up to date.

You’ll be fine with anything AMD or Intel even on debian stable, since they’re both active in developing their linux support, where nVidia doesn’t support FOSS drivers.

Not strictly true any more. There are Nvidia open drivers, but they may not be in Debian yet. In fact, Nvidia recommend using the open drivers for cards it supports, which if I recall correctly, is Turing and newer.

Going by my experience, the problem is something else at your end. Mind you, I don’t load it down with loads of extensions.

A free ride when they’ve already paid

True, but there’s a lot of stuff in the free software ecosystem that is just jank.

A lot of free software is built to scratch the authors itch. If you choose to use it as well, that’s on you. There’s nothing stopping you from forking it and making it work how you want it… except time.

Nvidia is actually as good as AMD now-a-days.

But RebbecaBlackOS still is.

I didn’t know it handled them (I’ve never used Discover) but yeah they’re not system packages so they will be OK too.

10 points to Gryffindor :)

with the GUI and toolset of Kubuntu

Not entirely, for example, Discover is only good for flatpaks in EndeavourOS.

Yeah. It’s KDE, there’s a setting for that.

Linux Journey will take you through the basics.

She is getting her masters in nursing online so it def needs to be able to accommodate that

Is there any specialist software she needs, or is it browser based?

Some are very different to each other, Arch and Debian where the former is at the bleeding edge of software and the later is the most conservative distro out there. Some are very similar, Ubuntu and Kubuntu where they are the same distro with a different desktop environment and default software.

I rarely see any references to MX in Linux forums

That could be a testament to it’s reliability.