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If you have an nvidia card I think you should just go ahead and give Pop OS a try.

I’ve been using it for a few months, and it’s been very stable.

It’s a great distro and has options for graphics cards made specifically for System76 hardware, some of which come with nvidia graphics cards. It might just solve whatever problem you’re having.

All of them.

I found up-to-date distros to be the least annoying when you mostly do programming, because unless you’re working in a really slow-moving ecosystem like C, most of your tooling will generally be tested against the latest or close-to-latest version of its libraries.
So, if those are the library versions that are installed on your system, that usually makes things throw up less problems.

I also had the impression that distros which do lots of custom-patching (which are basically just Debian-based distros) will break apart quicker when you have to make changes to your system (because they were custom-patched to work in this one particular way).
And sometimes you just have to or want to make changes to your system to get a tool to work.

So, my recommendation is openSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora, even though they may not always be quite as easy-to-use for non-programming things.

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Debian is the best for most stuff if but it takes some knowledge to configure Debian well. Also Ubuntu and Fedora are good for someone who does not want to tinker. Fedora is little worse for programming due to packages having different names than Debian based distros and most tutorials.

I think Pop!_OS is a great choice, it looks good and is very customizable and gets hardware updates pretty fast.

Pop!_OS is quite good. If you want a solid distro try Fedora too.

They are both equal for programming. Just learn to use command-line, docker, pick your text editor/IDE and then go programming on whatever distro you find comfortable on.

I’m a fan of Fedora. They update their packages regularly, but not bleeding edge. Their “toolbox” for spinning up containers is great for dev work. It let’s you easily spin up and destroy dev environments on a whim, without cluttering your system.

Not sure how their Nvidia drivers are lately, but IIRC they got a repo in the software center you can activate with them.

I think the least worst is OpenSUSE Leap or Tumbleweed with Plasma, because they have good support of containerization technologies, so you use the OCI images you prefer to develop and you can rest assured that the system will boot even in case of errors if you use snapshots by BTRFS. Plasma has desktop widgets for viewing issues from GitHub and GitLab which are very handy.

Manjaro is pretty good. The best thing about it is that it’s quite stable, the open source and proprietary driver is up to date and it has everything that Arch has, including aur.

what are the nvidia problems? I’m running Debian unstable just apt-hold my nvidia driver.

Really doesn’t matter to be honest. Whichever distro you choose, you’ll be able to program somehow. Pop_Os! is a good bet for graphics cards issues though, so I’d say roll with it.

A distro running a decent package manager like Nix (NixOS), pacman (Manjaro or Arch), or dnf (Fedora).

While it all depends on what languages you’re writing, if you’re relying on packages in the distros repos, you’re going to appreciate having a robust package manager to handle the crazy dependencies various language’s toolchains will require, especially if you need different versions of packages for whatever reason.

Arch linux ;) . Or if you need a more beginner-friendly install, manjaro or endeavor. The AUR makes installing the most up to date versions really easy… I remember on ubuntu, the repos had 3+ year old versions of a lot of things like postgres, which then people had to make custom ppas just to get the newest versions. That’s not a problem on arch-based distros.

Its a misconception that arch isn’t polished, or crashes a lot. I’ve had updates break things far more often when I used Ubuntu, than on arch. And I’ve been on the same rolling distro for ~ 3 years now.