notTheCat

I think gitui deserves to be on the list

Is it a switch in gnome sw or settings? If not it's not pretty easy

It used to be, Snap ootb is remarkably horrible, I had a not-good internet plan and Snap drove me crazy with its updates, I could've settled fine if auto updates could be switched off, but nope, they're shoved down my throat, I'd say Mint is a better starter distro

Endeavor allows you to pick from a number of DEs/WMs on installationa

I guess you could try an immutable distro (Fedora Silverblue comes to mind) if you want something that just works and you don't want to use it for programming

That really doesn't sound right, I have a 930m and it ran GTA V on med-high 720p (on Windows though..), the game itself is ps3/x360 era so you probably have a problem with the driver or maybe double check it's running on dGPU

It's not about including, it's about forcing, my laptop still has an HDD and when that garbage dropped I kept my laptop idle (couldn't use it since HDD usage was rocking 100%) for like 6 freaking hours, my HDD isn't that empty either so I don't know what the heck my PC was doing

Imo it's better that you wait, you could try installing vanilla Arch in a vm and distrohop once you're ready, if PopOS is suiting all your needs imo there's no reason to get Arch on bare metal (A vm for fun and learning would be satisfying ig), on a side note, getting the proprietary NVIDIA driver to run is very simple in vanilla Arch (like a 4 steps or so)

It doesn't always go well, especially with beginners, I've tried Plasma on Ubuntu and decided to go back to gnome, spent whole lot of time trying to purge all the Plasma bloat but couldn't

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA

I followed the steps in the installation section then installed nvidia-prime from Arch repos, prime-run works (I set up a custom menu entry of some apps that I want to run with the NVIDIA card) , the Vulkan demo detects and runs on the NVIDIA driver even without running with prime-run (afaik Vulkan does a good job detecting all the GPUs installed), I have the same setup as you do, Plasma with (Intel iGPU + NVIDIA dGPU)

As a fellow developer who recently moved to Arch, it's great, the installation process was a tiny bit frustrating (I did test it first in a VM) but after that it works as intended, I keep my eyes on the wiki though if any issues happen, nvidia driver works well with PRIME too, although I don't use it much (I dualboot for the sake of gaming), if you feel like you need to have even MORE control over your PC than your vanilla Debian or Fedora experiences, I guess Arch is the next step, on a side note, minimal Void Linux installation is very similar to what you get with Arch so in case you used that you already have a taste of what you're getting into, well, plus having access to the AUR :)

Oh also, I'm not sure about MATLAB, but Octave has been shipped as MATLAB compatible (although it haven't been the case for me with some functionalities...) Maybe you'll need a Windows VM if Octave wasn't enough, or maybe it runs using WINE I haven't bothered trying it