Fedora or Bazzite imo. I’m currently using. Bazzite and it just works for me. If you’re unfamiliar with immutable distros and don’t want to read the docs, I would just go with Fedora. It’s a stable up to date distro, no frills.

Make sure to get KDE as it’s the closest thing to what you’re used to and will make for easier transition. It’s very familiar like Windows 10 interface.

What on earth kinda PC you got that crashes when minimizing windows 💀 Sorry, I'm not being helpful.

When did you try Debian? Nvidia should be quite painless since they added the official non free repo. But make sure to install a backports version of the kernel and firmware. And modern apps should be installed with flatpak.

Anyway. I suggest that you try Debian again. There is nothing better out there.

Fedora kinoite/ Fedora Silverblue/ Any Fedora Atomic with a desktop flavour that strikes your fancy

These are immutable, basically unbreakable distros.

In defense of distros, the Nvidia nonfree drivers being absolute hell to install is not really the distro's fault. It has ALWAYS been a hellfest on every single distro I've ever touched. The only one it even remotely installs smoothly on is Ubuntu, and even then, not that well.

Zorin, OpenSUSE Leap seem solid choices. Even Tumbleweed, because openSUSE has a snapshotting feature built in, so even if an update were to break something you just rollback.

Don't follow online tutorial for adding nVidia to SUSE as the hard steps that still linger out there. Just add the nvidia repo that is specific to OoenSUSE Leap. Nvidia hosts it, but its described in one setup page on the openSUSE website.

Any of the ~15 most used distros is stable when you learn how to not fuck it up.

As an anecdote:

my Ubuntu and Debian installs used to break twice a year on dist upgrade back then (started with Linux when Ubuntu 12 came out, got it in a magazine). It would cost me a weekend of trying to fix it before giving up and reinstalling the whole dammn thing and re-doing my setup from scratch ...

Then I switched and my arch install has been the same for the past ~10 years with only minor fixes maybe once a year. It outlived the hardware it was on twice.

But every time people keep saying Debian and Ubuntu are stable and Arch is unstable 🤷‍♂️

Fedora KDE, or Nobara which is a game/editing pre-optimized version of Fedora that has nVidia built in with extra tweaks.

Mint with Gnome/KDE/other DE?

PopOS ? LMDE ? Fedora ?

I run LMDE have had zero stability issue's, running AMD.

Which desktop environments were you using on all those distros? Whats your gpu model? Because if its not suuuper old it should work just fine with the proprietary nvidia drivers that come with most distros these days.

You don't mention the specifics of your hardware and that's an important consideration.

I was a mint user for more than 10 years. It never crashed. It became my fail back when I moved to Fedora/Gnome. It's very crashed, but my laptop (ThinkPad X1 carbon) supports Fedora out of the box.

People keep saying "a DE you can customize..." While I love KDE, the amount of configuration available means that's it's easy to screw things up.

I suggest Gnome because it has a modern workflow and it's otherwise out of your way. Of course, you can install extensions. Just don't go crazy because extensions may not be as stable as the core.

The GNOME workflow becomes natural after a few minutes.

I'd recommend MX Linux KDE edition. The new version based on Debian 13 should be released this month.

It's basically just Debian with some added convenience utilities to make life easier, one of which was an nvidia driver installer that works a treat. Great little distro.

I'd recommend to try Mint again. What didn't you like about the layout? You can run KDE on Mint and it shouldn't make a difference to other distros.

Other distros to look at as a beginner are Fedora or SuSE.

Bazzite. Every other recommendation is wrong.

Bazzite is "immutable". What that basically means is that you won't be able to break it even if you try. And if it does break somehow (for example, because of a bad update), you can fix it by doing a rollback, which is literally a one-line command: sudo rpm-ostree rollback

Sure, there are other immutable distros out there, but Bazzite is probably the most popular right now, and it ships with Nvidia drivers so it's ready to go for 99% of people with no changes necessary.

in your case I'd say Fedora with a DE you can customize to your liking. Honestly just go for a KDE Fedora then you don't have to think about it.

I'd also say CachyOS but that might be out of your ballpark. Cachy just works. yes it's Arch based but it's by far the best Arch based distro out there. Monthly, on the dot, updates and works with whatever DE/WM you want to throw at it. Hell during the installation it gives you a bunch of DEs/WMs to install with it and all have been customized to work with CachyOS so you don't even have to think about it.

There isn't one and this place will gas light you.

Those recommending bazzite, the new hotness, are ignoring a host of issues that typical users, especially Nvidia owners will run into.

You have 2 ways to go. Deal with windows being annoying, or get good enough with Linux desktop to understand and fix all the shit.

Bazzite is probably the way to go if you want to learn it and are comfortable running containers to get the apps you need. Flatpack is still garbage.

Zorin or Garuda. Cachy is also nice