Hot take: Lemmy is an even bigger piece of garbage than Reddit.

It’s trivial. Use Linux Mint or Debian, enable non-free repositories if required, and that’s pretty much it.

I’ve never had issues with Nvidia drivers. Your mileage may vary.

It is a product of its time. If the same research was made 30 years ago, I bet there would be a stark difference to results today. LTO wasn’t as feasible. Compilers were less capable of removing redundant checks. Branch prediction in x86 processors was still a hot new thing. And on top of it all, there was less knowledge about language development.

Admittedly, I’m probably not the best person to ask for recommendation of a noob-friendly distro, but I feel people are overthinking this. If someone produces a list which includes distros I’ve never heard of, I think they spent too much time on ‘Top 10 Noob Friendly Distros in 2025’ websites.

If you really care about my recommendation, just start with Mint.

PS. I should also add, this isn’t criticism of you or any other new user who does search online for recommendation. This is more a comment on state of the Internet where there are so many websites which seem to pad their list with obscure distros where really all such articles should give recommendation for one of the same three distributions. Which three I don’t exactly know.