Can’t go wrong with fedora, just change from Wayland to xorg with the cogwheel at login.

So how fucked am I for starting to learn cpp as my first language, or is this a later down the road thing to worry about?

They’re just trying to validate their position…by creating boatloads of bureaucracy.

Just plain ol Fedora. Lots of recommends for Nobara but I doubt the performance increase from the tweaks will make much of a difference with modern hardware. I went down the “gaming distro” path years ago and it’s just not worth it imo. You do you though because whatever distro you’ll still be in go ol’ Linux.

Have you rebooted your system or tried selecting a previous kernel version upon boot to see if the problem remains?