Here’s my combo, the rain shell could be swapped out for any of the other million brands that make basically the same thing. It’s kind of pricey but versatile, warm, and lasts a looonnnngg time

Wool base layer: https://www.smartwool.com/en-us/men/base-layers/tops/mens-classic-thermal-merino-base-layer-crew/SW016349.html?dwvar_SW016349_color=001 Wool blend hoodie: https://chromeindustries.com/products/mens-merino-cobra-3-0-hoodie Rain shell: https://www.outdoorresearch.com/collections/mens-rain-jackets/products/mens-stratoburst-stretch-rain-jacket-300893

I seem to have similar use as you but use layers. I’ve had best luck with chrome wool hooded sweatshirt with a rain shell over the top. If it’s really cold I’ll put on a wool base layer too. It’s really warm and lasts a long time. I wear the sweatshirt nearly year round.

I too was scared of the arch but it’s been as easy as any other distro so far

That’s not what I said. My experience with nobara personally hasn’t been great and while I use bazzite at home for gaming PC but wouldn’t recommend it at this moment because it seems that the dev team is having some drama. I use cachy daily and find it wonderful and super easy. Not the arch difficulty that I was expecting. It’s a downstream.

Yeah I thought it would be great and bought into the hype. It ended up being one of the more frustrating distros for me. Maybe your right about the de being included in base packages? Regardless, it lost me after the second issue. On cachy now and happy. Plus I really like the little terminal update animation thing if pacman C eating the progress bar.

Once I tried to install a different desktop environment and that didn’t go well. Another time it just… Stopped working? I hadn’t changed anything. It seemed like a Nvidia thing but I never did recover it. Ended up doing a fresh install. If you’re 2 months in you’ve done better than I did! It might just not like my machine

You might just want to recommend fedora with the caveat that he’ll need to do a little setup with drivers. Bazzite and nobara are both fedora distros.

I strongly disagree with the order. To me, nobara has broken more than any of these (quite frequently actually), pop os is clunky and not intuitive, cachy is surprisingly the most stable for me and easiest despite it being arch based. Bazzite I use on my home living room computer and it’s been pretty solid. I’m a little concerned with it though because I believe they are having some maintainer issues that might impact future releases.

For real. It’s basically do you like typing apt, dnf, or pacman more? Do you want stuff ready to go with potentially things you’ll never use, or do you want to do it all yourself? Do you want daily updates or just occasionally updates.