Are you able to elaborate and give examples about distributions like Arch requiring users to do programming?

I just moved to Linux, and for some reason decided that PopOS was the right choice, although I was also considering Arch. Apparently, by your words, that was a mistake. I have had some really annoying issues so far, but most of them are universal, such as UI scaling being awfully implemented on Linux. Another one had to do with picking the default version of Lutris from Pop_Shop instead of the seemingly 2 years more recent Flatpak version...

I am a programmer from previously, and being able to customize the desktop experience by scripting, is a win for me. However, I wouldn't want that as a necessity. Needing to do programming or scripting to get around the OS for everyday use, is a huge minus. Not only is it cumbersome, but making a simple change can sometimes require tremendous amounts of effort. So can I get something more concrete and specific when it comes to Arch, etc?

The short answer is you should probably try Ubuntu, Debian (unstable), Fedora, Manjaro like the post says.

How on Earth did you end up choosing between PopOS and Arch? They're like two opposite extremes. I can't imagine how they could both appeal to the same person.

I am entirely new to actually using Linux for anything more than from a USB or in a VM. It’s primarily for games, so I need something with performance, as well as isn’t too nasty with an Nvidia GPU and a 4K screen. PopOS works great with the GPU, but apparently Gnome (due to GTK) sucks with 4K. I also needed something with good documentation around my use-cases, which I understood both Arch (generally good documentation?) and PopOS (primarily used by others with game-playing in focus) would give me.

Ah, I see. Well for Nvidia, maybe 10 years ago it was hard to make it work, but now just about every non-niche distro has an easy way of setting up the Nvidia driver, that's not a PopOS thing.

For UI scaling, the other big DEs are KDE/Plasma, Cinnamon, Xfce, Mate. Try those and maybe they'll work better. You can install them alongside Gnome, you'll get a dropdown for DE choice in your login screen.

Arch wiki (same for Gentoo, Debian wikis) is pretty good, but the secret they don't tell you is you don't have to use Arch to benefit from it. Occasionally you'll see a situation where Arch has instructions to configure something "from scratch", while your distro already comes with some config, so you have to understand that and reconcile it with Arch's instructions. Usually this isn't as hard as it sounds, just take note of other config files in a dir before creating a file Arch wiki tells you to.

This is also why I'm not a big fan of distros like PopOS that customize things too much in the name of newbie friendliness. All the customizations make it hard to follow generic instructions like Arch and you lose a valuable source of information. If everything works, then great. But eventually something breaks, and it's much harder to troubleshoot than in a more minimal distro. For example, I know somewhat how to fix the DPI issue on Arch by just adding a 1-2 lines to a config file. But PopOS probably already has those configs and many more, so I'd first have to find and understand why those aren't working, which is harder.

Of course you can also choose to have faith in the distro maintainers, and just hope that things rarely break, and if they break the support forums will help you out. But IMO Ubuntu is the best option for that approach because it has a more established community.

I am not going to switch right now; I’ll stick with PopOS for a bit, until I am more familiar with Linux. I’ll probably test some other DEs and distributions later. Much of the struggle comes also from just being unfamiliar with the system, such that when something doesn’t work, I have no idea in which end to even begin looking for a solution. Switching distros/DEs isn’t going to be helpful there; quite the opposite.

I doubt you can fix the DPI issues. Fractional scaling is inherently broken on Linux, in both GTK, X11, WL, etc. I came from Windows because I wanted something that works. Guess what I really got, was just something that happened to be broken in another way. :P My one true lesson from this endeavour, is that MacOS is the only OS that just works, and does so perfectly. But, yeah, that’s a sin to say amongst some people of the Linux community. ;)