If you happen to remember, what DE’s/WM’s did you use back when testing with your NVidia cards (particularly the 2080 and 3070)? I’ve been trying to gauge a lot of differences in DE usability, and driver versions. In my recent testing, one user on Fedora KDE 42 with the NVidia-open drivers with a 4070 have had a nearly-flawless experience that would be pretty much on par with AMD or Intel. Meanwhile a 1080ti user genuinely had major problems with both KDE and GNOME on the same distro with the standard proprietary drivers.

As for how much the average user needs to use the terminal on modern distros, especially with some of the graphical tools available, it genuinely is very little, if any at all. I think there is more of a problem with how many guides written go for the least common denominator approach of straight terminal commands for every tweak or fix somebody might look up. It is to a point where I might start attempting to write a series of guides and/or short-form videos for a lot of the more common ‘how-to’ and frequent problems that many users might encounter, both for GNOME and KDE at least.

Realistically, any LTS distro from a netinstaller or minimal image that can use a kiosk compositor like cage. So, the usual suspects of Debian, OpenSUSE, AlmaLinux, RockyLinux (or a derivative of one if the native distro doesn’t support Raspberry Pi). Then you just have cage open the browser of choice on startup (e.g. chromium --kiosk <url>) and you have a lightweight and relatively secure web kiosk.