So, what I wanted was a faster, rolling-release, easy-to-use with easy installation of Nvidia proprietary drivers

EndeavourOS. It's Arch-based, so it's a rolling release, the install Nvidea driver option is right on the boot menu when you first install, it's easy to use (and easy to install) and has a Wecome tool to help you navigate if you're not used to Arch. And, at least in my experience, it's fast

There's some drawbacks tho. It's on the lighter side: good if you wanna pick and choose what you wanna have on your system, not so good if you want something that's ready to go OOTB. Another thing is most of the action takes place in the Terminal, hence the "terminal-centric distro" thing. That's easily fixable tho, since you can either re-enable your Discover shop (KDE), the Gnome software center's already good to go, or just install Octopi or Pamac if you really don't wanna use the terminal for stuff.

Give it a go if you. It cured my distrohopping and basically ensured I'll never go back to Windows (long term anyways. Temporarily, well, sometimes you gotta).

Check out Nobara, it's basically Fedora with tweaks and automatically installs the Nvidia drivers for you.

What is a Ubuntu rolling release? You mean Rhino Linux? Thats unofficial AF, not recommended at all.

Rolling: Opensuse Tumbleweed, Fedora, EndeavorOS, etc.

I don't know what is Ubuntu rolling-release and I've been using Linux for twenty years.

If you're a beginner, just stick to Linux Mint. If you really need a rolling-release distro, use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and learn how to install, whatever your choice, the Nvidia drivers from your distro wiki/forums.

You never really said what you like about linux or why you even want to use it. You want an 'easy-to-use' distro, but I've never really run into a 'difficult-to-use' distro, and that's going back to the Slackware/RedHat 4.2 days. PopOS!, Ubuntu, EndeavourOS, Slack, Debian, they're all 'easy-to-use' when you don't specify a use case.

Personally I love the challenge, and that nothing is forced on me. It took me a good 30 minutes yesterday researching and trying to figure out how to get spell checking working in qutebrowser, and I got a little dopamine hit when I was finished.

Windows doesn't make me excited to use a computer. Linux does, because it's challenging.

Maybe give Pop_OS a try. It's Debian/Ubuntu based and works well. It's tiling extension makes gnome usable for me (and it's optional/off by default).

Nvidia is a breeze (included with the image iirc).

Pop!os and mint are the usual go-tos for easy windows-like experiences

I am however physically incapable of not recommending NixOS at any chance I get, it is by far the best experience I've had on Linux so far having tried a good number of distros (provided you have some knowledge of how config files work and don't mind installing software through one)

Simple Fedora, never had a better Linux Expirience ! Theres a new Video from Fedora Flock about State of Gaming on Fedora. It shows how easy it is to use the drivers and get steam up and running (--> activate Non-free Repos in softwarecenter settings and search for nvidia).

Dual boot at least until you settle on a distro and get comfy with it.

For Nvidia popos is best

https://pop.system76.com/

Yes, you can easily install the Nvidia driver on fedora, if you check the "enable third party repos" checkmark in the 1st time setup.

Honestly, if you don't wanna screw around at all, or use the terminal, then fedora is pretty hard to beat. Now 1 issue you might have is that older Nvidia cards tend to not work well with something called Wayland, that fedora uses out of the box for it's desktop, though you can change it easily at the login prompt, just click on the gear icon and select "gnome on Xorg"... if you're having issues that is

The Nvidia drivers aren't in the official repos do to legal issues, however they're in the rpmfusion repo.

You don't have to switch, you can dualboot if you have some disk space to spare.

Unfortunately the only rolling-release distro I've ever used for more than 10 minutes is Arch Linux, which is not "easy to use"; it's not hard, but you have to tinker with it every now and then (especially in the beginning, since you have to set everything up) - if you run pacman updates without looking at the archlinux.org frontpage beforehand you might find yourself with a malfunctioning bootloader or something on that nature.

AL updates are known for breaking things a few times, but in my opinion it offers a good compromise between DIY and ... y'know, Ubuntu.

It is good to start with something other than a daily driver, so that such problems don't hold you back as much - e.g. an older machine, or as others mentioned dual booting.

Just go for Pop_OS!

The gaming performance issues you were facing might be related to Vulkan support for the card, if it works better on Windows, as apparently Kepler cards don't have great support for Vulkan: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=273935

I see Vulkan 1.2 is actually the latest version of Vulkan that supported Kepler architecture GPUs like the GT 730, which stopped receiving non-security updates after October 2021: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5202/~/support-plan-for-kepler-series-geforce-gpus-for-desktop

On Windows, games probably used OpenGL. If you were playing games with Proton, it prefers DXVK because it offers better compatibility and performance than wined3d's OpenGL translation layer. DXVK 2.0 and onwards have used Vulkan 1.3, which requires a GPU newer than yours. I don't know whether Steam (and Proton 8+) falls back to using DXVK 1.10 or falls back to OpenGL/wined3d.

Either way, that means you haven't been getting the latest performance improvement updates in DXVK since late 2022. So force-enabling wined3d's OpenGL translation layer with PROTON_USE_WINED3D might help, if it's not doing that already? I don't know if OpenGL would actually perform better, so this is kind of a long shot...

If you were playing Native GNU/Linux games, it might be different.

I second the openSUSE recommendation. My brief experience with it was really nice.

Edit: Ah, I see you've quit gaming, lol. Well, either way, if you use Wine with DXVK, maybe the above will help.

If you only need a basic graphics card, why not replace that NVIDIA one with something by another manufacturer that's better supported driver-wise? Or maybe your CPU has onboard graphics? A basic card won't need to cost much, and it could remove the headaches with NVIDIA drivers and give you more distro options.

i have a manjaro install that has been going for 2+ years. with a Nvidia card.

just read the wiki on every update, and follow instructions.

on install select btrfs as the filesystem and than use timeshift to do backups.

Pretty big fan of manjaro

It doesn't look super complex to add nvidia drivers on OpenSUSE, either Tumbleweed or Leap.

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers

Have you tried Garuda? Best one for gaming. :)

using nvidia with any distro is a headache you don't need when making your first linux steps. sort that out first and then you're free to distro hop. it makes sense to endure said pain when you've invested truckloads of money into some RTX monstrosity, for the one you got it's just not worth it.