@okabe_rintarou @sjw @djsumdog @mononoaware @ExtraSpecialK @coolboymew

> It always seems to lead to ArchLinux for me, since I do consider myself a power user

don't overthink it. by the time you have enough familiarity to have an informed preference it will also be trivial for you to switch distros. it is even possible to replace one distro with another by installing it over the top on the fly (do take a backup first)

start with something straightforward and mainstream. debian, fedora, or a derivative like mint

> Can someone just briefly enlighten me as to how it is of importance what filesystem the Linux boot partition is?

when the system boots, the firmware has to load something. in the MBR days that was a very tiny segment at the start of the disk. it then loaded stuff from /boot so the filesystem had to be amenable to that (ie simple). other people on here know far more than me about this sort of stuff so I'll leave it at that

with UEFI you need an ESP. that can be any filesystem your firmware is capable of reading. in practice that means FAT32 because it's required by the standard so it's guaranteed to work with any compliant implementation

so with UEFI the filesystem used for /boot can be anything supported by your preferred bootloader. or in the case of a unified kernel image literally anything supported by your OS (with a few caveats regarding layered volumes) since the necessary drivers get baked into the initramfs

that means it doesn't really matter and you don't even need a separate /boot partition unless you prefer that for whatever reason (if you have to ask you'll probably already know). if you go with something like ext4 that will guarantee flexibility since most tools should support it. fat32 isn't so great because it doesn't support all the posix file attribute feature things that are taken for granted by all the tooling