Übercomplicated

You don’t need the laptop to run it, and I have unfortunately only had negative experiences with System76 laptops. I’d stick to the classic ThinkPads or maybe something like Tuxedo; the latter if you’re based in Europe.

Yeah, I second this. You may want to look in to DEs/WMs like DWM ©, Xmonad (Haskell), and AwesomeWM (lua) that let you customize them through programming.

Okay, people have said many good things so far, so I won’t add much. Simply one thing: take one problem at a time.

By this I rather mean, make your life easier, and only progressively deal with more complicated things. When it comes to distro choice, this would mean picking something with plenty of default installed packages (since you won’t necessarily know what to install yourself) — this rules out my beloved openSUSE Tumbleweed as well as the popular Fedora and Debian — something that will play nice with NVidia (Desktop Environments use display managers/servers, the two most common being Wayland and X11; Wayland is better, but unfortunately will really mess up NVidia gaming, so try to stick to X11 for now — you can always switch later!), and, lastly, something with a large community (and by extension a large help forum and wiki).

I never thought I’d hear myself (see myself?) saying this (typing this!?), but Mint checks all those boxes.

I wouldn’t recommend staying with Mint for long (though some people claim to enjoy it…), but as a first distro to introduce you to Linux, it really may be the easiest. Using a different DE is already difficult, don’t overwhelm yourself from the get-go!

Alright, that ended up being longer than expected. I wish you the best of luck, and a lot of fun on your approaching Journey!

A stripped down version of pretty much any distro is gonna do the trick here. Minimal install Fedora (or the lxde version), openSUSE tumbleweed, Debian (lxde flavour), arch, or Void Linux (will give you very, very good start-up time, as it uses runit instead of SystemD. It also has a great installer, imo, and is pretty easy to get the hang of—more so than arch). These should all be fine. Depending on how much work you want to put in, my top recommendations are Void and openSUSE tumbleweed. You could also try a tiling WM like Sway if you want to make the whole experience even more lite weight. Good luck!

Also shout-out to airwindows. Absolutely fantastic plugin collection, and entirely free!!!

Edit: also, while I’m at it, Orca is a great, though very weird, sequencer.

Audacity is decent, but Reaper is sooooooooooooooooooooooo much better. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo much. And it’s basically free (presuming you’re not a business).

I had literally the same Linux distro-hopping track as you. I hated fedora though, and after one year installed openSUSE and Void Linux on my 2 of 3 systems respectively (3rd system ran Arch the whole way through). Now I’m happy, openSUSE is a great daily driver work laptop (I have it running on ancient shit, but it legit feels super smooth with swayWM), Void is my tinkering and personal programming laptop (broken right now, but I’ll fix it soon), and arch is for heavy loads (cough, gaming, cough). Everything works and is efficient (Void has given me ACPI issues, but usually works). I think I’ll probably stay like this for a while longer.