Another vote for Mint here, I started out with it when I switched to Linux and has served me well for 4 years without too much hassle. I chose that over Ubuntu because I felt it has better out of the box options for Linux newcomers.

Nvidia drivers are quite easy and trouble free to install on Mint/Ubuntu and never had any problems with them myself.

well I tried Ubuntu - and I hate Gnome with a passion

So I found out how to change to KDE - much much better except when I turned on my computer this morning Kontact was there uninvited, wallet was turned on, and trash.tar.gz icon was on my desktop

I managed to clean up everything but the trash.tar.gz icon - sure wish I could do that - anyone know how?

45 gig is now used up on my drive - is that excessive?
I am considering downloading Kubuntu and overwriting everything

for KDE I would recommend an Arch-based distro. Probably KDE with nvidia is not a nice combination, I do not know.

Quoting: RickMwell I tried Ubuntu - and I hate Gnome with a passion

You're not the only one. Somewhere along the way they butchered everything with a constant need to remove options. And now it's down to a one-size-not-fitting-me.

Quoting: Guesti recommend using non systemd distribution fork of debian called devuan
i tried many distros last year, like many, like fedora mint ubuntu years ago, trisquel, safeos, manjaro, antergos, debian.
but i have laptop but systemd is such a bloatware.

devuan is the linux that i used for 8 months (i only started using linux in january last year) for instance mint is okay but i get bored very quickly with it and battery lyfe is not that great too. on mint i can watch movies for maybe 2 hours maximum, devuan gives me approx. 250 minutes of watching movies.
for instance i have KDE desktop environment on devuan, it consumes 250mb ram memory.

The question is if you gonna use opensource or proprietary gpu drivers.
devuan has synaptic package manager and lots of stuff to download. it used sysvinit as init system.
no matter what anybody would say i stay here with devuan so this is what i recommend.

another recommendation is gentoo linux if you are into linux administrating.

id say these two distros are best, but devuan is seriously great. name may be not great, but distro is great.

https://devuan.org/

edit: Id also recommend Artix linux which is based on Arch with openRC or runit as init system, however i been having massive issues with resolving connection and i even managed to get rid of networkmanager and connect to wi-fi via dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant, but nothing helped... that was too irritating and i came back to devuan cuz for some reason playonlinux wasnt performing well on artix had issues...
for instance playonlinux on devuan is ok.

you have to ask yourself a question if you wanna have rolling release or stable. devuan is stable artix is rolling release.

The init system should be irrelevant for the use case the OP asked for. For video card support for gaming, the easiest way is just to go with SteamOS or Ubuntu. The latter is probably better, since it was meant to be a general use OS.

Quoting: Guestwhat the hell is OP??? can you at least please use normal english words when you speak to me??

and init system matters because you dont wanna bloatware on your computer. and systemd is big bloatware and huge bug
systemd is hard to maintain. other init systems are simple to maitain.

OP - original poster
I'm not in love with init systems but it seems that it is good enough for debian and armbian. There is a lot more bloatware on a typical linux desktop anyway, like all the gnome and kde libraries that load every time just because they are in the chain of dependency for some program you are trying to use. This is why i gave up running any kind of *boxes too: they don't provide anything extra and your typical application will anyway install lots of gnome/kde stuff.

I would recommend going with Linux Mint either choose cinnamon or mate, it's a matter of taste there is no wrong choice - except if you don't chose cinnamon ;)

if you want long term support ( ie not having to update the base OS every 6-12 months ) I recommend looking at LMDE2 ( Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 ) it's functionally identical to regular Mint, except it's based on debian so older more stable packages. Great for getting work done - less so for cutting edge drivers, games and apps ;)

Basically Linux Mint is Ubuntu without the suck fest that is gnome/unity

(edit is broken, so new post)

Personally I like Gnome, but I realise it's very different to what people may be used to.

I think Mint is generally a very good shout, but it can cause problems where regular Ubuntu wouldn't, so I have ended up installing regular Ubuntu for technical reasons where I would have preferred Mint.

This cynic guy is really rude, isn't he?

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: damarrinPersonally I like Gnome,
This cynic guy is really rude, isn't he?

Buggy, badly designed and slow redhat software fanatics are masochists.

Buggy? I dunno, I don't recall encountering any bugs tbh. That doesn't mean there aren't any, but there are some bugs in every DE.

Slow? It's never been slow for me, even on my old laptop.

Badly designed? Well, that's a matter of taste. Personally, I like it.

I've tried KDE, Budgie, XFCE, Mate, Pantheon - and I like GNOME best. Pantheon would probably have a 2nd place, but that's only available on Elementary OS, so yeah...

If I were to install sth like KDE, I'd end up trying to customize it to look like GNOME.

The activities overview is a real killer feature for me, and I'd seriously miss it if I were to switch to some other DE.