I was able to get going with kubuntu pretty easy.

Kubuntu. Pop os or nobara seem to be the popular ones for new people. Not that they’re particularly special. They just have a lot of things pre installed. Which saves some hassle.

With all that said. BACK UP YOUR WINDOWS INSTALL.

545 won’t boot into Wayland/KDE for me either. Black screen, monitors idle. No video output. Xorg is the only thing that works.

I’ve tried all these supposed fixes adding things nvidia-drm did nothing. fbdev=1 actually caused the system to not boot at all. Wouldn’t make it passed bootloader.

Whether or not Wayland works at all with Nvidia seems like a diceroll. I’ve done countless hours of research and it really seems like for some folks it just doesn’t work. Nobody can pinpoint why yet.

I intend to stick with one for awhile. Hopefully

I know that’s an option. I’m just not confident enough to know which packages I’ll need to get going yet.

I know that for the most part. They’re easily replicated. The gamer distros seem to have two benefits for me.

Knowing what you’ll need can be a little rough as a new guy. They at least claim to have a lot of all that bundled in. Maybe someday I’ll build something a little more ground up. Once I get some knowledge.

The bigger ones have communities of people dedicated to gaming. Which might come in handy. ( Which isn’t to say their knowledge won’t apply to different OS. It likely would.)