Caveman

I came to the same conclusion, Nobara for would have been best.

Good for stability, bad for flexibility for when the homelab grows more complex.

At the start I just wanted a desktop machine that runs Steam through sunshine/moonlight so hardware support and gaming stuff such was very important.

My homelab used to run on my laptop when it could all fit within a couple 100s of GB and I was the only user but moving it was tricky. Since I’m a programmer I’m not afraid of this stuff so I just spent the hours to figure out one problem at a time.

I ended up figuring out adding HDD whitelist in SELinux, make it accessible in podman, manually edit fstab because tools didn’t work, systemd service for startup, logging in automatically where I already forgot everything and would have not had to do any of this on a bog standard Ubuntu server.

I set my homelab up on Bazzite immutable with podman and SELinux. It took a while to work everything out and have it boot up into a valid state hahaha

Depends on how long you’ve been working. After some amount of time like a year or two you can drop it into a conversation when helping a person “oh, I actually use libre office so I’m not sure where MS put that, let me check” and if they want more info they’ll ask. Sometimes they might be surprised that you can actually do this stuff on Linux.

First pick a desktop environment, currently KDE, Gnome and Cinnamon are the best.

• Gnome: Opinionated design like apple
• KDE: tons of options.
• Cinnamon: A bit fewer options than KDE but still a lot.

All of them are very robust and have a massive user base.

Then pick a base to operate on. Fedora, Ubuntu and Mint are all good options.

• Fedora and Ubuntu are good for newer hardware and 99% of the time just works.
• Mint just works all the except for newer hardware.

Nvidia GPUs are not a big issue but you have to install the proprietary driver yourself for best performance and fewest bugs.

My pick for you is something your friend uses if you have a friend on Linux otherwise Fedora KDE or Kubuntu.