I recommend [Solus](https://getsol.us/). It has all the relevant Nvidia drivers branches.

The default drivers for your card are atm at version 415.25.

Just go with Ubuntu, seriously. It's the easiest distribution around.

thanks so far - I am considering Fedora over Ubuntu - would be happy to hear any reasons why I should not do Fedora

Well, why are you considering it over Ubuntu? Ubuntu is one of the most beginner friendly distributions around and the main one supported by game developers.

Go with Ubuntu or similar. Fedora is not supported officially by most games and steam itself, driver installation can be troublesome for new users etc.

was considering Fedora since less overhead - more streamlined

but thanks - now it looks like I'll go with the vote here

Fedora user here -- I also think that you should go with Ubuntu; but only because that would make for a smoother start. After you get some experience, come to understand what you really want from a distro, etc., you'll want to try out other distros anyway.

Fedora doesn't really have any major drawbacks for gaming (not being able to build 32 bit wine [quirks having to do with multilib support in Fedora] is about the only gaming-related frustration I can recall having in a very long time). It's also real easy to add multimedia & proprietary driver repos. It's a pretty fast moving distro, and occasionally (rarely) a kernel update might break the proprietary nvidia drivers -- which is not a big deal, as it's easily fixed. But still, with Ubuntu you don't have to think about any of this right as you're starting out.

If you want something with less overhead, by the way, you might want to try Xubuntu first. It's standard Ubuntu that comes default with a somewhat simpler (in my opinion, FAR more useable) desktop environment. Check out www.xubuntu.org and decide for yourself.

As other said ubuntu could be more friendly, however fedora is usefull for work

Maybe can begin with lubuntu / xubuntu / ubuntu mate

Gnome and kde needs some tweaks

^_^

GNOME comes ootb with the most essential extensions on most distros (eg Solus, Ubuntu, Antergos).

Also, with this kind of hardware, he shouldn't really worry about any overhead. The games performance won't be affected be the DE of choice.

In my experience, Ubuntu is not the easiest. Why? Because the upgrades between releases don't always work correctly. I've always had headaches when upgrading between releases.

You could try Mint with Cinnamon for an easy transition from Windows, almost no configuration needed it just works and you have access to the latest Ubuntu drivers from PPA but sadly not the latest Kernel, but with your config it should be more than fine.

Manjaro could be a nice introduction too in my opinion.

Another vote for Mint here, I started out with it when I switched to Linux and has served me well for 4 years without too much hassle. I chose that over Ubuntu because I felt it has better out of the box options for Linux newcomers.

Nvidia drivers are quite easy and trouble free to install on Mint/Ubuntu and never had any problems with them myself.

well I tried Ubuntu - and I hate Gnome with a passion

So I found out how to change to KDE - much much better except when I turned on my computer this morning Kontact was there uninvited, wallet was turned on, and trash.tar.gz icon was on my desktop

I managed to clean up everything but the trash.tar.gz icon - sure wish I could do that - anyone know how?

45 gig is now used up on my drive - is that excessive?
I am considering downloading Kubuntu and overwriting everything

for KDE I would recommend an Arch-based distro. Probably KDE with nvidia is not a nice combination, I do not know.

Quoting: RickMwell I tried Ubuntu - and I hate Gnome with a passion

You're not the only one. Somewhere along the way they butchered everything with a constant need to remove options. And now it's down to a one-size-not-fitting-me.

I would recommend going with Linux Mint either choose cinnamon or mate, it's a matter of taste there is no wrong choice - except if you don't chose cinnamon ;)

if you want long term support ( ie not having to update the base OS every 6-12 months ) I recommend looking at LMDE2 ( Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 ) it's functionally identical to regular Mint, except it's based on debian so older more stable packages. Great for getting work done - less so for cutting edge drivers, games and apps ;)

Basically Linux Mint is Ubuntu without the suck fest that is gnome/unity

(edit is broken, so new post)

Personally I like Gnome, but I realise it's very different to what people may be used to.

I think Mint is generally a very good shout, but it can cause problems where regular Ubuntu wouldn't, so I have ended up installing regular Ubuntu for technical reasons where I would have preferred Mint.

This cynic guy is really rude, isn't he?

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: damarrinPersonally I like Gnome,
This cynic guy is really rude, isn't he?

Buggy, badly designed and slow redhat software fanatics are masochists.

Buggy? I dunno, I don't recall encountering any bugs tbh. That doesn't mean there aren't any, but there are some bugs in every DE.

Slow? It's never been slow for me, even on my old laptop.

Badly designed? Well, that's a matter of taste. Personally, I like it.

I've tried KDE, Budgie, XFCE, Mate, Pantheon - and I like GNOME best. Pantheon would probably have a 2nd place, but that's only available on Elementary OS, so yeah...

If I were to install sth like KDE, I'd end up trying to customize it to look like GNOME.

The activities overview is a real killer feature for me, and I'd seriously miss it if I were to switch to some other DE.

Quoting: DoctorJunglistThe activities overview is a real killer feature for me, and I'd seriously miss it if I were to switch to some other DE.

I also like the activities overview (a vestigial macOS-ism, I suppose... though nowadays macOS exposé is less useful than it used to be). However there's a widget in KDE that's an even better implementation than what's on GNOME (e.g., KDE has an option for per-application exposé; which is very useful).

I use a little independent program called '[skippy-xd](https://github.com/richardgv/skippy-xd)' in XFCE; it's very fast, and serves me well. There's also a native 'dashboard' for XFCE, though last time I checked it looked like a hideous mess.

Please stop the preaching @debianxfce, I'm sure nobody has missed here what your opinion is regarding how to use Linux and what kind of projects you like or not. Really no need to try that hard to convince other people to use Linux the way you do.
Please respect other peoples opinions, even if these differ from yours, and leave the freedom to everybody to use Linux their way.