The very first computers were programmed using physical switches and buttons. Punched cards came later. Being a programmer in those days was a lot harder than it is now!

Isn’t Zorin very out of date?

If you’re supporting it, then one you are familiar with would be my recommendation. If you’re both beginners, then Mint.

You could say they got ahead of the game.

They were a nice-to-have!

Quality Abandonment?

On EndeavourOS, you just have to run nvidia-inst. Mint has the driver manager, and other distros have ways of handling it. For your card, you’ll want the Nvidia Open driver if it doesn’t do it automatically.

TLDR: These days it’s easy.

Out of date Nvidia drivers was the main reason I moved from Tumbleweed to EndeavourOS, at the time they were a couple of generations behind and didn’t even have explicit sync.

When installing on Arch (or a derivative) you should run sudo pacman -Syu package_name so it is always up to date.

You’ll be fine with anything AMD or Intel even on debian stable, since they’re both active in developing their linux support, where nVidia doesn’t support FOSS drivers.

Not strictly true any more. There are Nvidia open drivers, but they may not be in Debian yet. In fact, Nvidia recommend using the open drivers for cards it supports, which if I recall correctly, is Turing and newer.

It can’t be as good as the original series, of course that could just be nostalgia speaking.

Going by my experience, the problem is something else at your end. Mind you, I don’t load it down with loads of extensions.

A free ride when they’ve already paid

True, but there’s a lot of stuff in the free software ecosystem that is just jank.

A lot of free software is built to scratch the authors itch. If you choose to use it as well, that’s on you. There’s nothing stopping you from forking it and making it work how you want it… except time.

Nvidia is actually as good as AMD now-a-days.

But RebbecaBlackOS still is.

I didn’t know it handled them (I’ve never used Discover) but yeah they’re not system packages so they will be OK too.

10 points to Gryffindor :)

with the GUI and toolset of Kubuntu

Not entirely, for example, Discover is only good for flatpaks in EndeavourOS.

Yeah. It’s KDE, there’s a setting for that.

Linux Journey will take you through the basics.