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?
a cheap e-fatbike. it’s almost free to ride and it has a decent range of about 30 km without pedaling so it gets me anywhere i need to go. i regret that i didn’t get one that has studded tires available, riding on ice is scary (finland). it also squeaks on bumpy roads like an old bed…