I could be that jackass that says "well your first mistake was buying x when you should have bought y." I'd be correct, but it wouldn't be helpful to anyone actually trying to deal with this kind of problem.
I'm still "new" to linux myself, despite attempting to use it several times over the years, so I don't have any actually useful advice. I can however say that linux mint (after getting it installed and updated and upgraded and updated again), runs flawlessly on modern AMD hardware. The package manager even has a gui!
Until now I have used Ubuntu, Mint, both Opensuses, Arch, Endeavour, Fedora, Manjaro, and Gentoo
And not a single time did I have any problem installing any of these
Also, if youre new to linux and encounter a problem, you should first consult the forum of your Distro. Those people can actually help you find out the problem youre having and Open a bug report or expand the Wiki with your edgecase and the appropiate way to solve it. But going all Heuli Heuli on everyone instead of actually submitting bug reports is the most unproduktive and childish way to solve the problem you (and probably a few more people in the future and past) have had.
it's 2025, what popular distro makes it not easy?
Nix
For nvidia? Alpine Linux. It's so hard there is 0 support outside of nouveau
(I mean, Alpine uses MUSL instead of GLIBC, so expected)
For AMD? doas apk add linux-firmware-amdgpu mesa mesa-tools vulkan-loaders xf86-video-amdgpu There, you're good to go(wiki also tells you that)
Gentoo, LFS, Slackware.
popular
if you're using any of those you can't complain about having to run a few command lines
LFS is not a distro and I highly doubt it's popular as well.
Yeah for NVDIA you either wanna use a distro that bakes it in (Bazzite, PopOS) or hop over to tge command line and install the drivers there, e. g. Fedora:
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA
No idea how GUIs are for this nowadays (Manjaro, Linix Mint, Ubuntu, back when I used those distros it wasn't working too well most of the time).
Fesora shows a popup on first boot along the lines if "click here if you need NViDIA drivers." If you install an Nvidia GPU aft the fact you have to search for it, but there is a GUI.
Arch-based distros do have the nvidia-dkms package available, works great in my experience. Linux Mint and Ubuntu got a dedicated driver utility for this. Debian provides a "nvidia-driver" package. OpenSuse provides it via YaST, or manually in a dedicated repo.
Does it work as good as having the driver pre-installed? Hell no, those nvidia drivers are gosh darn awful in nature. We can just hope NVK can completely replace them asap.
I honestly really like pop os. I use it as a daily driver and it's been great. The only thing I hate is that I can't change the system color but I know there's an infinite amount of ways around that.
