I’ve been using Garuda for… Two or three years? I’ve done a lot of distro-hopping looking for something that won’t just break on me. I used Ubuntu for a long time but kept running into situations where it would break, such as boot loops. Eventually I settled on Garuda because it ships with newer software and Nvidia drivers, which is helpful because I use my PC for gaming. I have stuck around because it’s garuda-update command automatically makes a backup of your system out of the box, and you can select to boot into a backup in grub then restore it really easily. There have been a couple times where something has broken on an update, but when that happens I can immediately restore the backup, and I don’t even need to remember to run a backup manually. I do feel that the default theme is a bit gaudy so I swapped it to a default KDE, but other than that I’ve had pretty much only good experiences with Garuda.

I’ve personally been using a raspberry pi with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. I just run jellyfin in Firefox and navigate with the mouse - the keyboard rarely ever being necessary. I was able to increase the icon size so it’s acceptable on a tv and bookmark any streaming websites I use. It’s certainly not as clean as using something like an apple tv, but it’s serviceable and I don’t have to fiddle with plugins like when I tried Kodi. Honestly though, apple tv probably fulfills what you’re looking for like others have said.

Garuda is more user friendly than most arch distros, but you really might want to consider something like bazzite. You can always change the desktop environment and theme as much as you want regardless of distro, although if you’re looking for a Windows -like experience I recommend KDE with it’s default settings.

Yeah, that’s Debian for you. It can be really good depending on your use case - you’re never going to have anything break up on an update since they don’t update packages often. It can be an annoyance sometimes though.

Debian ships with older but stable packages. It won’t provide you the latest version of your Nvidia drivers, you’d probably have to get them from Nvidias website yourself.

Installing Linux on top of a Windows install is a non-issue, the other way around can be a problem. I’ve been dual booting for years without problems. I keep mine on separate drives, though.

Sometimes, the simplest option is to try a different distribution instead of messing with individual things that aren’t working on one. A lot of distributions come with the Nvidia drivers set up by default, such as POP OS. You could also try a fresh install of mint and install the Nvidia drivers using the driver manager application, and see if you’re getting the same results. As far as NTFS, that does have to change. You will keep running into problems if you don’t format them into something like ext4. When I first installed Linux, I had all my games on an NTFS drive and very few of them would work at all.