Noooooob here: As title said - I don't know what distro I should choose. My needs are student stuff like Libreoffice & Videoconferences but also creative things, photo-management and cutting videos. Does it matter at all? Do I have to check for every single program I use or is there a distro that is recommended?
I was planning on getting a Tuxedo with Tuxedo OS, but my neighbour recommended another "no os"-seller and now I'm not sure. I was opting for Tuxedo mainly because of the support since I'm leaving windows after many years^^
(Picture shows the lilac and blueish ports that we had for mouse and keyboard back "in my days" with the words "How old are you" - "Me:" on top - just because this community semmingly requires a picture added)
I hate to recommend Ubuntu, because of their locked garden bullshit, but yeah, ubuntu.
I personally use Linux Mint for creative work with an amd gpu and it has been a nightmare, mainly because I need amds proprietary drivers, and they are a buggy mess on mint. Since ubuntu is officially supported, I hope it would work better on there, but I couldn't get ubuntu to boot.
So if you have an amd card, driver support should be taken into account. With nvidia I had a lot less trouble.
The AMD vs Nvidia experience you are describing is polar opposite of mine and what I always read about. Never had a single issue on AMD, never had anything stay working right for very long on Nvidia, to the point that I sold my Nvidia card to escape that uncertainty.
I mostly have run pop os but also used elementary os for a bit. Both Ubuntu based distros, like mint
I know. I chalk it up to my use case (3D modeling & rendering w/ blender, Game Dev), which needs AMD's proprietary drivers, instead of the open source ones. Running them on Linux Mint probably doesn't help either, since it is, strictly speaking, not supported by AMD.
But pop os is not supported by amd either. I don't know that a distro based on Ubuntu would normally have issues supporting graphic drivers made for Ubuntu.
I find your situation all very confusing since if proprietary drivers are what you're trying to avoid, Nvidias situation there is far worse, which I've read 100 times and experienced myself. The only way I got any game working at all was with the proprietary drivers and even those would break things frequently. A game I ran last week now would fail to launch at all, stuff like that.
Until now I don't think I've ever heard of anyone saying anything positive about Nvidia on Linux.
I wouldn't say I try to avoid proprietary drivers. nVidia's worked well for me even better that open source, but amd's caused issues with my graphics even after reinstalling Mint without them. Now that I reinstalled them months later it works better... Who said the world wasn't magic anymore 😂✨
I guess what I initially tried to say is that it is worth to do some research on the supported distros for proprietary gpu drivers, should you need them to hopefully avoid freak accidents like this.
I too like to think that any ubuntu based distro should be okay running software for ubuntu, but when I messaged AMD's support they basically just tapped the your distro is not supported sign xD And I guess it makes sense, given that there could be critical differences between stock ubuntu and ubuntu based distros, too much to cover for a remote tech support.