Digit

Now if only I could hack up top to show which bedrock stratum each process running from, like paradigm did for me one christmas with (a now old version of) htop, I might consider learning how to use top.

Htop’s hard to beat.

Others, like btop, are too heavy, too try-hard.

Would be nice if top were as convenient and easy. Oh wait, that’s basically htop, again.

XFCE’s been going the longest and strongest, unbroken.

Though, the user can install them all, try them all, on almost any distro. GNOME, Mate, Trinity, KDE Plasma, XFCE, Cosmic, Cinnamon, etc etc. And/or just window managers, Icewm, i3, fluxbox, for a fairly easy time from the start, or more fangled things like xmonad, herbstluftwm, dwm, etc. … I dont know the wayland things. Dozens to try.

Point being, well raised here, is that the distro does not matter so much, and new users need introduced to what the freedom means, specifically in how when you select your distro, you’re not stuck with the desktop environment it first provides.

PS, GNOME’s bad news, on multiple levels. Don’t get me started. NSFL horrors lurk.

Installing Gentoo, for the first time, especially as a newbie to linux, is like the jump program in The Matrix movie.

“Everybody fails the first time.”

“But what if he doesn’t?”

Even if you’re not “the one”, the attempt would sure be a great learning experience. Alas, that was specifically stipulated against in the OP’s criteria, on the first line:

I don’t want to go on a full learning process from the start

Deb based on nvidia always went well for me.

* Shrug *

I ran pure Devuan for a couple years on such hardware. (Besides that, all Suse, Sabayon, Gentoo, BedrockLinux, VoidLinux, all happy, did go well.).

Sure, Pop!OS’ll likely be fine.

AntiX first sprang to mind before reading further through your list.

Mint, MXLinux, and SuSe also came to mind.

Not sure how well each and every part sought is covered. Though probably almost any distro will do.

PS: https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=All&category=Beginners&origin=All&basedon=All&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=All&package=All&rolling=All&isosize=All&netinstall=All&language=All&defaultinit=All&status=Active#simpleresults

I’ve done the impossible/insane on the other side… manually imported a live system from usb into bedrock.

If I then did an unbedrocking… that’s a fun double janky way to install a live ISO to “exactly” like it is on the live system.

… I’d never do that though. If I did, I’d just re-hijack it again, back to bedrock.

Yup. Too easy. Cheat codes.