Linux

a distribution is just an assortment of packages, it's the same linux + driver underneath. nvidia on linux is a headache. are there people who made it work? sure. is that a worthwhile waste of your time? it is not.

get hardware that's linux supported and you'll have plenty of challenges during the transition, you don't need the additional "self destruction in..." countdown timer booming from the speakers.

if you still wanna have at it, pop_os (however it's spelt), bazzite and nobara are some od the distros that have dedicated nvidia install images and are thusly more likely to work OOB and work better afterwards.

Like others suggested here, the problem is probably nouveau and you might want to try a gaming-oriented distro which usually configure these things correctly out-of-the-box. My favourite is Nobara and Fedora (which didn't work for you but works for me because I have different hardware). People suggest Bazzite, but I cannot recommend it because it's based on Fedora Atomic, and I don't get along with Fedora Atomic.

As a general admittedly non-helpful suggestion, don't get Nvidia hardware if you want to use Linux.

Give Linux Mint a spin, I seriously doubt there's a friendlier distribution for newcomers from Windows.

I have a desktop which has / had a similar problem.

Originally I built it with a g-series Ryzen which has integrated Radeon Vega graphics. Upgraded to a 3060 and wanted to run Linux for gaming instead of windows.

I couldn’t get a distro to reliably use my graphics card without the issues you describe. Stuttering, crashing, generally unusable.

Garuda was the answer (to be fair I’d try Bazzite too but I just didn’t get there as Garuda worked). In fact, it worked out of the box for me and I enjoyed it so much I made it my work OS.

I like the GUI utilities they’ve made for front-ending a bunch of Arch CLI utilities and I’ve been saved by BTRFS snapshots more than once.