To be fair, testing in a VM is for seeing the basic fundamentals of the OS. Ok, let me try to help with a couple of things then.

For finding you distro:

1. Find your favourite environment. Is it GNOME, is it KDE, Cinnamon, maybe it’s Xmonad or dwm? There are a lot of these and you should test this first. Distro doesn’t really matter in this step. Just find one with the desired environment and test it in a VM.
2. Once you find your perfect environment, find out if you want a really stable system or something cutting edge? Maybe something balanced in between. Distro still doesn’t matter in this step. Once you decide what you want, now you can find distros that suit this.
3. Choose you favourite init system (Optional). Some people like to control what’s under the hood. Just note that, not choosing systemd will filter a lot of distros here. If you don’t care what’s under the hood, skip this step.
4. Now you have narrowed down to possibly 3-10 distros. Still a lot. However this step is where you choose your favourite package manager. If you don’t care about the mechanism, just pick one you liked from the default installations of them. If you are using Linux for some time, you might already have a favourite package manager.
5. Congratulations, you have found your distro. Just use it and see for yourself.
6. Wait, it might still not be the correct one. However you cannot know this without using them daily. Some people stay with what distro they start, some people distrohop a lot and settle on Debian. And some other love their niche distro that works nicely for them. Stay with what really clicks with you.

Why don’t you try distros in a virtual machine first?

To be fair that’s an improvement over his previous photos where he looks like an alpha version.

My initial reason was computation freedom. It got so much better in years, I just take the rest as a great bonus.

The bubble is like this at this point:

I’m selling this sunflower seed. !!! Only 50 sun !!!

Couldn’t even buy a Raspberry Pi nowadays :(

You should check out BraveOS at this point I think.

It sounds like you would enjoy Linux though you should at least know that running your games will need additional hoops comparing to Windows since they’re Windows games, nothing something wild and will be mostly about changing the default WINE to Proton if you use Lutris or Heroic for them. However sometimes you will probably need to troubleshoot for some game time to time, but you’ll get used to that once you learn the idea.

Linux Mint is likely the safest choice here. Zorin is also fine for newbies.

Also note that, a lot of things will be different than Windows, though you can always search for an equivalent for something you used. At least the structure is much more beautiful on Linux, unlike Windows’ chaotic nature.

They also put a fking anticheat on a 20 year old single player game.

If you think LibreOffice is good, then you don’t need to switch. If you have problems with the lack of familiarity of MS Office, then you might wanna check it. Though Collabora recently made a better replica UI, which is technically LibreOffice in a suit.

The pig is a drag queen at this point.

Yeah, no idea why it was marked as obsolete but at least I didn’t have to meddle with configs for that. Maybe because of upgrading 2 versions in a row.

That’s good news! Mine had some quirks like I had to uninstall and reinstall Jellyfin and some couple things for some reason too.

But yeah, I would like some more automated upgrade as well. Though Debian itself is a manual installation so current situation makes sense.

I have a similar machine from 2011, though it’s x64 >> Samsung N150P. I used it as a typewriter for a couple years and I can suggest the same for you if you have such interests. However later I turned it into a homeserver and currently it serves as Pi-hole, Jellyfin, syncthing etc. Without x64, server might be tough but typewriter wouldn’t mind. For general daily stuff, it’s not really useful.

No problem!

Yeah, it took me kinda long to find about it as well. By the way, if you decide to install it, don’t forget to also install a GUI for it, something like iwgtk for example. Good luck!

It is indeed a pain to use on Linux. We have a similar (maybe the same) Macbook Air and recently I had to deal with the same thing to make it usable. I have tried many different distros, and most of the time I had to install the broadcom-wl driver via phone-tethering. Installing or even using dkms version is not the only problem too, the driver is also awful. The distro I settled was LMDE, surprisingly it was the only distro that came with Broadcom drivers, which was a plus at first. However it deteriorated so fast as you described, I had to find a permanent solution. My solution was completely ditching broadcom-wl drivers in favour of Intel’s iwd driver.

iwd also has performance issues time to time, but at least disabling/re-enabling it solves the issue, unlike had to restart the Macbook with broadcom-wl.

I also tried to replace the Broadcom Wi-Fi module by opening the back cover of Macbook since I had a Wi-Fi card laying around, but sadly the one on Macbook was not a nowadays’ standard M2 unit, so couldn’t done it.

Technically all distros support Nvidia since it’s a kernel thing, however some of them have better out of the box experience, so it would be wiser to go with one of those distros. For gaming, it’s usually better to have more recent drivers, if you play different varieties of games and some of them are newer titles. Though depending on the games, even Debian could be a suitable option.

If you don’t want to learn under-the-hood features, Bazzite could be a nice option for you. If you want familiarity with Windows, you might want to go with KDE as your desktop environment. However don’t be afraid of trying new angles if you like the general idea of a distro. So Pop!_OS might look different than Windows, it’s also a solid distro.

If you’ll need Microsoft programs or some Windows-only programs, choose something you can install Winboat on it, which isn’t currently usable for Bazzite, until the devs bring Podman support for it. Know that, Winboat is not the only interface you can install Windows programs, it just makes things much easier. So depending on the programs, Bazzite still could be a good option for you.

People here seem to recommend Arch-based distros but I wouldn’t start with them, at least until you get some familiarity with Linux in general. There is no problem using them, but a beginner couldn’t handle if something goes wrong after an update (usually happens with Nvidia). It does not happen a lot, but even once is enough for people who can’t handle it.

There is nothing wrong with Linux Mint. You might find it quite straightforward. It does not have the latest Nvidia drivers most of the time but this might not be a problem for you. If you play newer titles though, then it’s probably not the distro you would want.

I wouldn’t say never against a FOSS project. Some people do like GNOME. It’s the best to see for OP’s own eyes. They might like it or hate it. However one shouldn’t be prejudiced. Hate all you want after you tried and found weak points for your usage cases. Some popular distros use GNOME for a reason. Personally I find it too restrictive, but I don’t hate it. You would have rights to hate if it was the only DE around but you have tons of alternative options out there.

If you knew/remember the first days of KDE 5, it was the buggiest DE ever invented at that time. However nowadays I barely even see any bug in KDE, at least for my use cases. And I’m a WM guy who use KDE out of laziness.