Was about to post a Hugging Face link til I finished reading. For what it’s worth, once you have Ollama installed it’s a single command to download, install, and immediately drop into a chat with a model, either from Ollama’s library or Hugging Face, or anyone else. On Arch the entire process to get it working with gpu acceleration was installing 2 packages then start ollama.

I use Arch for my daily, and I would highly recommend against it for new users. 99% of the time it’s just fine. 1% of the time some edge case sneaks by and you update before a fix is pushed. In those cases, I’ve had installations be deeply broken, far beyond my expectations of normal users.

For actual recommendations, something Debian based for sure. Vanilla Debian, Mint, or Mint Debian edition. If you wanna live on the edge, Sid is rolling but in my experience was more stable than Arch.