Mint is the typical way to get a more up-to-date Debian and if you have something against Ubuntu. This community is pretty anti-Canonical so they'll never recommend Ubuntu...

Manjaro should not even be considered in the modern distro landscape, the story of manjaro is just a series of incompetent mistakes.

Don't pick a distro, pick a desktop environment. Look up KDE Plasma, gnome, cinnamon, xfce, etc. Then pick the largest most stable distro that uses that environment.

Do not use Manjaro. It is a known trap. What you can do is install pamac, which is what Manjaro uses for GUI package management. It's been a hot minute since I've used Arch, so here's a tutorial:

https://itsfoss.com/install-pamac-arch-linux/

Alternatively you could look at Garuda, which is a solid Arch distro. You'll either love or hate the theme, but that's easy to change. It also comes with an interactive kernel by default (most distros use a regular kernel build, which works better for servers).

Whatever you do, please please please not Ubuntu. It's the lowest common denominator. Emphasis on "lowest". It was good in the past, but Canonical have really lost the plot.

I feel like I should throw in a good word for Fedora. I run a combination of dnf and flatpak, and have a grand time, and am doing an IT diploma program aimed very solidly at Windows under Fedora. I've used Ubuntu, Mint, and Manjaro, and landed on Fedora for my desktop experience.

I mean EndeavorOS can install the same gui package manager as Manjaro has, pamac.
Game support usually comes from using packages you need and those packages being up to date to support latest changes like fixes.

Am a long time EndeavourOs user, quite happy, it allows everything i need and pacman never broke on me.. cant say the same about apt, when using non-standard repositories (for some up to date packages)
And the AUR is awesome. Has many packages not found in the normal repositories, just some have to be compiled which can take a bit of time, but i dont have to fiddle with it.

I should point out that openSUSE also uses btrfs. I feel I should also point out that that neither it or Fedora has to be installed on btrfs.

I use Fedora Kinoite myself

You'll have the die-hard "XX is the best distros" and the "distros are irrelevant, choose a DE" answers here. The reality is that it will all boil down to your hardware, use case and willingness to tinker, in that same order.

For example, I love PopOS for laptops with Nvidia cards, only because I am used to the Cosmic version of Gnome PopOS has used all these years (looking forward to the proper Cosmic DE once its out), but for PC (regardless of GPU) I'd rather use Fedora KDE (customized to a Gnome feel) because I find it easy to customize to a very granular degree, and I feel Fedora has the best mix of cutting edge + stability.

As you can see, there's a whole lot of "I" in my comment. That's the beauty of Linux, whatever you end up sticking with, you get to make it as YOURS as you want it to be.

Arch derived distros require more carefully maintenance than most other base distros (RHEL and Debian), but are also great to actually learn Linux more deeply. RHEL derived distros, IMO, are a better balance between "it just works" and "I can make this happen", and Debian based are the easiest to maintain, mainly because it tends to be what the most popular distros out there are based on, which makes for a much larger community for when we hit a brick wall (when, not if).

Bottom line is that I believe you would be better off going the route you mentioned, and going through the pitfalls of each until you find that sweet spot.

And of course, once you're on that road, come and ask anything you want, most of us are always happy to help if we can.

So the opinions of those of you who’ve used Davinci Resolve, Unity/Godot, and/or FreeCAD

Search for those packages in distro repos, and check if they're available through some alternative pm like flatpak. If you need them fresh, and there's no alternative, you can discard centos and debian. If there are, I'd suggest MX (debian).

An over reliance on the terminal to fix simple problems

The closer you're to the bleeding edge, the more you'll need to use the terminal to fix simple problems. For me, debian and mint never crashed or failed to boot, arch on the hand...

Debain (alt Linux Mint DE) Pro: The most stable OS I’ve used, with a wide range of software support both officially in the distros package manager, or from developers own website. I am most familiar with this OS and APT Cons: Ancient packages which may cause issues with Davinci Resolve and Video Games

I don't use Davinci Resolve but I do play videogames, I build my own desktop for it and I use Linux MX (Debian), it's rock solid.

"Ancient packages" are not a problem with backports, there are also flatpacks if some backports are not enough for you, or DEB packages directly from software developers (I manually install a couple of those).

The only games you will have problems with are those implementing invasive DRM, but that's not a "Debian" problem, Linux in general doesn't support that kind of DRM (not yet at least), tho I personally don't mind since I think DRM is stupid and I've always tried to avoid it.

I would go with Fedora or Mint, both for their software support and stability. Personally I like Mint over Fedora, I think it has a larger selection of software packages but I could be wrong.

Btrfs is more stable nowadays, I wouldn't worry about that. And anyway you can choose XFS or Ext4 during installation while setting up your disk partitions.

If you are worried about a particular software package being too old, try installing FlatPaks instead, or use the Nix or Guix package managers which can co-exist easily with any other package manager.

I had the same apprehensions as you against using a CLI package manager, but I have to say it's grown on me. I used Debian based OSes for 5-10 years and I swore by Synaptic.

After only a short while with Endeavour though, I found that I was perfectly happy to run sudo pacman -Ss to search for software — or yay for the AUR. It's been my daily driver for a couple of years now.

I wouldn't recommend any of those. Since you have Nvidia go with Linux Mint or Pop os as they both have good support for Nvidia.

Another vote for Debian stable with backports and flatpaks. I don't really have an issue with outdated software, and I really like "apt", maybe because I'm so used to it as this point. I've been running mainly Debian for 12+ years now.

My second choice for personal use would be Arch Linux. I had very good experience with it back in the day and their wiki is fantastic. But I'm too comfortable with the simplicity and stability of Debian at this point.

At work I use Ubuntu because everyone else uses it. It's not too bad. I just ignore all the crap I don't like (like snaps).

Manjaro has also died on me in the past, because they fuck with the packages, EndeavorOs is rock solid and you will thank yourself when you can install stuff like spotify, discord, teamspeak with a single yay command

It doesn't matter that much, but I like Arch... it's a bit of a pain to install if you are new to Linux though. I find it more stable than Manjaro though.

Your decision probably should depend on if you like KDE or Gnome and if you want the latest software or something a bit more stable.

You could also try the live version first before you install it to make sure everything works as intended.

I was a happy Ubuntu user for more than a decade and I agree that it's a good beginners distro. I am now using Manjaro, which is also very good. In fact, Manjaro might even be more beginner friendly because it support Flatpak out of the box.

I’m just gonna say, go with something Debian based. MX Linux is very solid.

EndevourOS (alt Manjaro) Cons: Manjaro has died on me once, and is a hassle to setup right and keep up. EndevourOS has no Package Manager GUI, and is over reliant on the Terminal. Can’t use pacman in a terminal the commands are confusing.

I hear this and I highly recommend Bauh. Its a GUI package manager that supports Arch, AUR, Flatpak and Snaps. Will even automatically generate snapshots in Timeshift before you update. Super easy to use. I can't recommend it enough, I use it on all my desktops.

Pop_OS is a good choice for a gaming machine, it was perfect for like 4 years until I upgraded my 1080TI for a 7900XTX and the Mesa version was too old to run it at the time so I switched to Manjaro.

Personally I hate most Arch based distros with a burning passion. Like I have used arch wiki to install Arch at least 3 times after it had shit the bed during an update. Now if I need to open a terminal to install a distro I'm not installing it. I just wish the people maintaining Manjaro weren't so incompetent and also include common codecs (h264 and h265) in Mesa like every other distro.

If you need DaVinci Resolve, just know that when you switch to Linux, you will lose the ability to read and render mp4 files. You will need to buy the full version to be able to do this on Linux.

I use my desktop primarily for video editing, 3D modeling, and a bit of gaming, and it's been running Pop!_OS since December with absolutely zero issues. The only annoyance has been the mp4 file thing in DaVinci.

You sound like you'd be pretty capable, I personally use arch, less perceived limitations. Endeavour is the better choice between endeavour and manjaro.

MX if you just want a os with beautiful theming.

Either way good luck.

Choice of distro isn't as important anymore as it used to be in the past. There's containerization and distro-independent packaging like Flatpak or AppImage. Also, most somewhat popular distors can be made to run anything, even things packaged for other distros. Sure, you can make things easier for yourself choosing the right distro for the right use case, but that's unfortunately a process you need to go through yourself.

Generally, there's 3 main "lines" of popular Linux distros: RedHat/SuSE (counting them together because they use the same packaging format RPM), Debian/Ubuntu, and Arch. Fedora and OpenSuSE are derived from RedHat and SuSE respectively, Ubuntu is derived from Debian but also stands on its own feet nowadays (although both will always be very similar), Mint and Pop!OS are both derived from Ubuntu so will always be similar to Ubuntu and Debian as well), and Endeavour is derived from Arch.

I'd recommend using Fedora if you don't like to tinker much, otherwise use Arch or Debian. You can't go wrong with any of those three, they've been around forever and they are rock solid with either strong community backing or both strong community and company backing in the case of Fedora. Debian is, depending on edition, less up to date than the other two, but still a rock solid distro that can be made more current by using either the testing or unstable edition and/or by installing backports and community-made up to date packages. It's more work to keep it updated of course. Don't be misled by Debian's labels - Debian testing at least is as stable as any other distro.

Ubuntu is decent, just suffers from some questionable Canonical decisions which make it less popular among veterans. Still a great alternative to Debian, if you're hesitant about Debian because of its software version issues, but still want something very much alike Debian. It's more current than Debian, but not as current as a rolling or semi-rolling release distro such as Arch or Fedora.

OpenSuSE is probably similar in spirit and background to Fedora, but less popular overall, and that's a minus because you'll find less distro-specific help for it then. Still maybe a "hidden gem" - whenever I read about it, it's always positive.

Endeavour is an alternative to Arch, if pure Arch is too "hard" or too much work. It's probably the best "Easy Arch-based" distro out of all of them. Not counting some niche stuff like Arco etc.

Mint is generally also very solid and very easy, like Ubuntu, but probably better. If you want to go the Ubuntu route but don't like Ubuntu that much, check out Mint. It's one of the best newbie-friendly distros because it's very easy to use and has GUI programs for everything.

Pop!OS is another Ubuntu/Mint-like alternative, very current as well.

For gaming and new-ish hardware support, I'd say Arch, Fedora or Pop!OS (and more generally, rolling / semi-rolling release distros) are best suited.

Well that's about it for the most popular distros.