Try pop_os. It’s gnome tiling can be enabled and disabled from the top bar and it’s defaults are sane and easy to change.

Maybe give Pop_OS a try. It’s Debian/Ubuntu based and works well. It’s tiling extension makes gnome usable for me (and it’s optional/off by default).

Nvidia is a breeze (included with the image iirc).

Or https://arcolinux.com/ to learn how things work.

Also check https://github.com/junegunn/fzf and https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

Two great utilities that will reduce the number of file jumping and searching you need to do. :)

More useful tools: https://zaiste.net/posts/shell-commands-rust/

I’d go for Pop if you’re new. It’s not perfect and System 76 are busy developing their window manager so the distro hasn’t seen any major changes since their tiling extension, but it’s fairly stable.

I recently had a guest and we wanted to play games. I pulled a 2018 laptop with an NVidia 2060, installed the latest Pop, Steam and we were playing less than an hour later. It works fine.

I use pop to develop in Rust and Kotlin/Android.

I’m not a fan of Gnome but the tiling in pop is good and that’s what I still use it.

You can always try more distros in a VM and see if/what you like from others.