Fedora or Bazzite.

Unified package system

Go with NixOS.

!Or LFS. (Just kidding)!<

You might like Arch, especially now that it has installer, I wouldn’t consider it hard to setup and use. Also you’re not even new to Linux so youll handle it easily

Debian.

You know apt, it will be familiar, but more raw for you to play with, and no snap.

A fun activity would be to set up dotfiles of your home directory, and then write a set of scripts to do all of the things you would typically do to set things up (software, gsettings preferences, etc).

Then, if you decide to change from Debian to something else based on Debian (sooo many distros) in the future, your scripts will work out of the box getting you set up in minutes.

Edit: You can also try distros at: https://distrosea.com/

I recommend Fedora. It’s user friendly and nice to use.

Fedora is usually pretty good at being up to date while still user friendly and still operate like a classic distro. The immutable ones are also pretty nice if you’re into that. Otherwise you could consider Arch or Endeavour. If you’ve been using Linux since 2012, an Arch distro’s probably easier than you think.

I switched to Arch in 2011 after being on Ubuntu since 7.04 and the Unity disaster… and I’m still running that install to this day. I’m typing this from it!

In practice I’ve found Arch’s always up to date packages to be less of a hassle than dealing with dependency hell of carefully pulling newer dependencies when you inevitably need a newer feature of a package. Worst case there’s containers for the few stubborn “only works on this exact version of Ubuntu” cases but it’s pretty rare.

Stay with Ubuntu LTS or go Debian.

Linux Mint Debian Edition. You can use Debian testing repos for more updated packages and kernels if you want. Also, it seems like more and more applications are adopting flatpak anyway.

Since you have experience on Linux, why not Arch Linux. It’s not that hard-to-master-install from the past since “archinstall” exists.

And you get a system with all your wishes of combinations that exist in the linux world. And the best well documented Wiki from Arch stays at your side.

Alternative would be fedora, easiest installer of all. And their logic of “just all firmwares, can’t fail” should help nvidia users out-of-the-box.

I’m using OpenSuSE Tumbleweed and can recommend that. It’s user friendly, especially with the powerful Yast tools for configuring a lot of things. I’m using KDE but it does have a good Gnome spin.

All of the tools you’re using will work without issue, and I have an Nvidia 3070 which I’ve set up without issue with the official Nvidia drivers. I game a fair bit with steam and everything works well.

If you’re not a fan of rolling release then OpenSuSE Leap is the same but point release.

OpenSuSE has good official repos and large variety of community repos, plus Flatpak if you need it. The only difficulties I’ve had are with Python which is installed in a weird way to allow multiple versions to be installed for devs - it can be fiddly installing python software dependencies into the right places, especially if they want you using pip.

Also you said you use VirtualBox - I used to use it but have switched to KVM and strongly recommend it. Guest systems - particularly Linux guests - work better in KVM. Worth exploring in your next system - in OpenSuSE it’s been a doddle to set up but should be in most systems.

I see people recommending immutable desktops - I’d be cautious about switching your desktop to that if you don’t have experience of that kind of system. They have strengths but definite drawbacks too. I’d try another distro not too disimilar to Ubuntu before exploring the world of immutable distros.

Maybe try an immutable system in a Virutal machine. I’ve played a bit with them and they’ve not been for me - too locked down and if you like to tinker or try niche things you’ll find yourself fighting the OS. Also Flatpak is convenient but it’s not the ideal or most secure way to be running all your software, and lots of software isn’t available as Flatpak.

And for Nix, it is very good but can be used on many distros. You can get another traditional distro and try it out - if you like it by all means switch to NixOS but you don’t have to use NixOS to use Nix. Again it seems too big of a leap to go all in to that on your main desktop. I’d make a smaller change unless you’re open to reinstalling your main desktop a few times trialling bigger shifts.

I can wholeheartly recommend you either Bazzite or Aurora / Bluefin.

All three are pretty much the exact same under the hood (Fedora Atomic). They are from the uBlue-Project and focus A LOT on user friendliness, hardware enablement and a “boring” (just works) experience.

Bazzite is more meant for gaming, and Aurora and Bluefin are more for general use, but you can of course use them totally interchangeably. You can even try out one, and if you don’t like it as much, you can rebase to another variant with just one command.

The cool thing about them is that the Nvidia drivers are already baked into the image if you choose the Nvidia option on the download page.

This means, that you probably won’t encounter any breakages, and even if you do, you don’t have to fix them on your own. If your setup breaks, every one else’s will break too, because the non-user-facing part of the OS is the same everywhere, and the devs will fix it very rapidly. In the meantime, you can just select the image from yesterday, where everything still worked, and continue with your stuff for the next few hours :)

I’ve never encountered such a chill distro in my Linux journey yet!