I fully expected all replies to miss the point. You can’t make more nuclear power without massive amounts of petroleum based energy and products.

But, again, it doesn’t matter, and isn’t worth arguing about. People don’t get it because why would they want to get it? It sucks to get it.

Die. We will die. The only crutch that props up our massive jump from 1 billion pre industrialized society to our current 8 billion human beings on this planet, has been cheap and plentiful fossil fuel. Notably, it is the only thing that has allowed us to practice agriculture on a scale that supports our population growth. When it’s gone, there is nothing to replace it, short of a miracle fusion revolution.

The average carbon cost to produce an electric vehicle is about 6 tons on average, not including the battery, about the same as an ICE vehicle. Where does the energy for auto manufacturing come from? Primarily coal and natural gas, with a sliver of insubstantial wind and nuclear power. About 7 barrels of oil go into each and every tire on the road (between expended energy and actual petroleum products in the tire). Charging the battery? Coal, natural gas, and the same trickle of alternative sources mentioned above.

Speaking of those alternative energy sources, what do we use to make them? Building a nuclear power plant is likely the most carbon intensive process ever devised, from the machinery that moves the earth, to the foundry that makes the steel. As much as I’ve always wanted to believe in a cozy eco future, every time I squint a little I can see that it’s all just a coat of green paint over the same old oil field. The people trying to sell you on oil, and the people trying to sell you on alternatives to it, are doing the same thing. Selling you something. That’s all that matters to them.

There is no feasible alternative that changes the outcome. There is no replacement for what has allowed us to create wonders and horrors beyond our ancestors wildest dreams, and sustain a population far beyond anything we could have achieved without fossil fuels. When oil finally becomes unproductive, so will the mechanisms that hold our current civilization together, and we will wind up back in 1810 if we’re lucky, or 400ad if we aren’t.

Call me a doomer and downvote me or whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Stating your experience level and distros that you’re interested in would be helpful, but in lieu of that, here’s my recommendation.

Make a windows restore USB, so you can restore your system if either of these distros don’t seem to work out for you.

First, try Linux Mint. Install it, try to exist in it for a while and see if all of your hardware functions the way it should. Learn some stuff. Mint makes it easy for the most part. Drivers are simple and everything can be done in the GUI.

If Mint has hardware issues, try endeavourOS. It’s a rolling release, running on a fresher version of the kernel, with possibly better support for your hardware. It’s a bit more command line focused. Keep it simple. Update weekly using yay, and see how it goes.

If neither works for you, break out that windows USB and go back to the drawing board, or keep digging. Linux is a less intimidating experience than it used to be, but it still generally requires an active learner who wants to solve problems as they arise and learn more about Linux in the process.

I’ve been working on my CLI skills and knowledge over the past year, and moving to an arch based system was a little confusing for me. Using yay, pacman, and git cloning were a little over my head after being used to apt and flatpak. After the first week, it all started to click, and now I’m fine, and I definitely feel more competent in the terminal, and no longer use any gui front ends for package management.

Mint and Pop had issues, steam would lag like crazy for the first five minutes after launch. Then after updating to the latest version of mint, steam stopped launching period. I’m sure it’s fixed by now, but that’s what drove me to jump ship, and it’s been the snappiest, cleanest experience I’ve had yet. I also love space, and the color purple, so it’s the first distro where I used their native theming and wallpapers, and shit it looks good.

The forum has also been a pleasant experience, the community is very friendly.

I’ve had a significantly better experience with EndeavourOS than I ever had with Nobara, or literally any other distro, and the list of them I’ve run through is pretty long. Nobara was good, and I’d be curious to see how its improved, but at this point I’m so happy with Endeavour that I don’t know when I’d ever get around to putting Nobara on bare metal again.

Okay. I finally ran it. I used GE Proton 8-11 and it runs like a Swiss watch on my machine.

So, just use glorious eggroll homie. You up to speed on using protonup-qt already I imagine?

Homie I’m so sorry. I should have mentioned I work 60 hour weeks. Tomorrow or maybe even tonight I’ll try and give it a whirl.

Ooo ooo I’ve got one.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits. It’s like a Pixar souls like adventure game. Lots of foresty magic, very beautiful, and challenging enough to give you a run for your money while she laughs at your many failures.

It’s a good game.

You know, I haven’t revisited this game since switching to Linux. Now I kind of want to spin it up and see what happens. I’ll report back if fail or succeed.

I’ve gone through about a dozen distros over the last year since I decided to use Linux exclusively, finally landing on EndeavourOS as my current home distro.

You know what I’ve found? I don’t play games nearly as much, because due to whatever the hell is wrong with my brain, I enjoy the troubleshooting as much or more than the gaming. It’s become an unexpected weekend joy to find some random game from my past have an absolute ball tinkering to make it work only to finally launch the game and say “alright, that was fun” and go to bed.

I should probably see a professional.