First pick a desktop environment, currently KDE, Gnome and Cinnamon are the best.

• Gnome: Opinionated design like apple
• KDE: tons of options.
• Cinnamon: A bit fewer options than KDE but still a lot.

All of them are very robust and have a massive user base.

Then pick a base to operate on. Fedora, Ubuntu and Mint are all good options.

• Fedora and Ubuntu are good for newer hardware and 99% of the time just works.
• Mint just works all the except for newer hardware.

Nvidia GPUs are not a big issue but you have to install the proprietary driver yourself for best performance and fewest bugs.

My pick for you is something your friend uses if you have a friend on Linux otherwise Fedora KDE or Kubuntu.