my experiece is that with nvidia you can’t just choose which distro you want to use, you need to try them out and find the one that works. for me mint cinnamon worked great out of the box, i use the xanmod kernel on it because of load balancing. i’m still very much a noob but i have almost completely ditched windows, only need it for excel and word. also pop os gets praise for playing nicely with nvidia. not sure if running on vm can cripple something in the system, have you tried booting from a live usb?