Anything to help a fellow Linux user my dude. I’m not as skilled as some of the other folks on here but I try when I can.

I think I saw someone mention hyperland which may be up your alley but you also mentioned you’d like to stay away from Arch so not sure if that’d work in this case.

KDE has changed quite a bit, you might like it better now. I think the recent changes have been good but I guess I dont change it as much as you might want.

TL:DR, Kubuntu or Fedora with KDE

Everyone will have their own opinions on this. Just speaking for overall desktop environments, KDE is my top pick. Pretty easy to pick up and change. Works well, feels like Windows but actually good and very customizable. And extensible.

As for the distro behind it, pick your poison. I think either Fedora or Ubuntu. KDE spin would be Kubuntu which is what I currently use. Both are pretty popular and supported well.

Some people dont really care for Ubuntu but coming from Fedora with KDE, its been a much smoother experience personally. Yes, I’m not a fan of snaps, but they can be turned off. In all, I’m using Linux, I’m much better off on Ubuntu than Windows privacy and security wise which are the main things I care about aside from being able to change whatever I god damn please.

I struggle less with shit not working on kubuntu. Fedora for the most part was very solid but there were more than a few times Steam for whatever reason gave me issues on Fedora. I’d consider steam a pretty easy thing to install and use but I had lots of issues with it just not starting or crashing, hanging when downloading updates. Really annoying.

Could be im just better at using linux now than I was back then as Fedora with KDE was my first real jump to Linux from Windows.

Yea you’re in the right place lol. Like others in this thread, ive also thought about this a lot.

I watched a video recently of someone using a pi for android auto: https://youtu.be/Puk_pzMGd7c

I think the only problem you’ll find is that the software would need to be more custom if you didn’t want to use Android auto. Some kind of customized launcher for the pi or something akin to that to mimic a infotainment system.

IMO, using a pi for android auto would be the easiest way to do this but totally get wanting to do it on your own.

I think as long as you use something like organic maps and have a GPS module, a pi should be able to at least do GPS. That said, I think you have to use downloaded maps in that case. I can’t say for sure but that’d be my best guess.

As for screens, my advice is just buy a screen from pi. I looked extensively for a screen that you can hook up to a pi with usb c or anything else and from what I saw, a lot of the options for touchscreens are worse and or more expensive than what pi offers at $65 and its about as plug and play as it gets since they built it.

In all I think its very doable hardware wise. Software would maybe be your only hurdle depending on how exactly you want this set up. If you wanna throw a couple weeks of work at it, I’d be interested to see it so def post again if you do.