Linux

I've been extremely happy with Linuxmint the past 2-3 yrs. However I have a higher end AMD card. 97% of games play great under Proton with steam. I use Rustdesk to remote into other Linux machines as well as windows OS servers/desktops even with multiple screens and it works without issue. Just my $0.02 and I know it's heavily Ubuntu based but the stability and usability as a daily driver, also working as an IT professional has been great.

Last piece, it's been a rare occurrence but if I'm messing around using bleeding edge graphics drivers or "playing with fire" messing with deeper system configs, drivers, etc and shit the bed I have had 100% success using TIMESHIFT to completely restore my OS back to its previous state with zero data/config loss or issues. You just need to have the discipline to remember to take a backup before you know you're going to be potentially blowing something out. But, that said, it fully restores everything. I have a 18TB external USB I just use for that and it doesn't even take long either, restoring a 2 & 4TB SSD system that's pretty loaded up with data.

For RDP, i use Remmina, no idea if it will do what you want for your weird monitor layout, but it is a well featured RDP client.

I would say that your experience is unusual, even with nvidia. Ive always used nvidia, and its generally been a significantly smoother experience.

I swear, every time one of these posts/comments pops up, the chances root issues are caused by Nvidia hardware is insanely high.

Long story short, I can’t use multiple monitor RDP because I have different resolution monitors and they are stacked 2x2 instead of all in a row.

Did you try setting them up as one big display across all four, instead of four little ones? I think that's something you can do.

Does the multi-mon RDP thing work from a Windows client too? I'd be surprised if it did, Windows' multi-monitor support is fairly lacking in my experience too.

For me, the built up revulsion I feel towards windows and the sheer determination I feel to never use it again, means I would rearrange my monitors, or, you know, try more than two distros.

Linux isn’t for everyone, I acknowledge that fact. It requires a user that wants to troubleshoot, wants to figure out why something doesn’t work and make it work. If the headache isn’t fun, you’re not the right kind of masochistic self flagellator that Linux attracts, and that’s okay.

If you ever do decide to give it another whirl, try Linux Mint, MX Linux, or my personal flavor of choice, EndeavourOS. And put your monitors in a boring straight line like the rest of us before you coming crawling back.

This reply is meant to be partially humorous but entirely honest.

Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you :(

To squeeze in a metaphor : Linux is just a hobby project that kind of got out of hand in a previously Microsoft dominated world.

In the BSD world (FreeBSD,NetBSD,OpenBSD etc.) things are actually much worse. I've read that on computer conferences BSD developers come with an Apple Macbook (Running MacOS) to show BSD software development, which is running on servers. And I like BSD, but on the desktop it is still lacking. One only has to look at the amount of packages which no longer have a maintainer. I am not complaining about it, as I realize that maintaining open source software can be a burden.

If you want to play some more with Linux on the desktop, you can use WSL on Microsoft Windows, or use VirtualBox. Wanting to make Linux your daily driver may require more patience, or throwing money at it to speed up code development.

I read the first paragraph and saw your prerequisites included working with nvidia.

That is a non-starter, right there. You can blame Linux for a whole lot of little flaws, but most of the blame should go to your hardware vendor for providing shitty support for Linux.

Weird, sucks you had a rough time. I'm mostly perplexed about the network card issue, and the monitors. I haven't had any trouble like that in more than a decade. I've honestly actually had more trouble with a new install of windows failing to detect hardware than Linux recently.