If you are an advanced linux user then I would suggest giving a try to the following distros: arch, void, gentoo and (like you said in the post) nixOS.
The reason behind is that this distros are focused on the tinkering aspect of linux, the experience of setting up everything the way you want.
If you want to give a shot to WMs I would suggest i3, sway, dwm, dwl, river, bspwm, Qtile and hyperland (maybe focus more on the Wayland ones if you want to try the latest software).
Linux mint I would say its the one that tends to have better support in a large amount of hardware and it was the first one that I was able to stick with
Like others suggested, lemmy communities and some news sites like HackerNews.
But also some YouTube channels like Mental Outlaw, The Linux experiment and Brodie Robertson (most of them also have Odysee channels if you don’t want to use YouTube). Also Luke Smith (actually he shills a lot of foss software).
Congrats bro! Sadly, the nvidia drivers are proprietary but eventually it might not need to be with the progress we are seeing on NVK. Almost 100 percent libre system poggers 😳
You can install them like any other package from dnf/apt and then run them with startX (if its X11) or start them via their name if they are Wayland compositors (all this in the tty, the black screen with just letter outputs)
Getting rid of WhatsApp is the most challenging part for sure, specially because people at work choose to use this platform. Funny enough, signal is basically the same as WhatsApp and easily accessible on the play store but people refuse to use since they are accustomed to WhatsApp and because the illiteracy on these kind of technologies.