Same here. I do not miss all the shit windows did. Things like:

• starting drivers manually to use graphics tablet
• finding drivers for hardware that work
• random driver crashes for various pieces of hardware I have
• BSODs
• rummaging around settings, configs and regedit to get something to work a bit better
• disabling things you don't want through regedit or some hidden config
• uninstallable bloatware
• ads everywhere
• super key + type in the program you want to open not working
• messing around with tons of files for old games to work
• going through shady sites to get software
• not having a software center for all your downloads
• needing to install weird programs for sftp support
• needing to reinstall the os when a big issue develops and you did not manually set up backups

ironically half these things are what people think is the linux ux. Seriously, windows is just terrible, clunky, buggy and full of things you need to be an advanced user to fix.

I'm a very recent convert. I downloaded mint a couple months ago after seeing that my entire steam library was rated as highly compatible on protondb. At first I planned to dual boot but I didn't have any reason at all to use windows and finally just took the plunge and made Mint my daily, and sole, driver

As much as people complain about electron (some valid, some not) Linux has benefited quite a bit to the cross platform availability of local applications.

Linux Mint (XFCE desktop) is the best for beginners coming from Windows, in my opinion. Linux enthusiasts will fawn over KDE because of customization, but they ignore that the vast majority of people don't want to spend months tweaking pixels, widgets and animations, they just want to use the computer.

I think it doesn't actually matter what distro you use.

It's like whether you're wearing red socks or blue socks. As long as you're wearing socks, so you don't get cold.

I went fedora which is not a beginner system and even fedora is easier than windows.

Common suggestions are: mint, pop os, endeavourOS. But it doesn't matter, they are all functional OS that let you do everything.

You will be pleasantly surprised almost daily, I hope! There will be a minor learning curve since you are used to windows philosophy and linux is different.

Take it slow and do it the right way, don't let Lemmy pressure you if you're making slow but steady progress. It's a learning curve for sure

This is a very valid and smart concern to have. But the scary commands all start with "sudo", which gives everything you type in root access. Other than that linux is very secure and idiot proof as long as you read what the commands do. For software linux is way more secure as gone will be the days of rummaging through dodgy sites for installers. Instead you just open up software center and find the app you want and it will be installed straight from the official upload. The repos software centers have are customizable so you can add and remove them. Instead of checking if the installer is secure, you check if the repo is secure on the rare case you add a new repo.

I mean a popular app distribution is flatpack that ships apps like steam and blender and whatever in a sandbox with access only to resources they absolutely need access too. To the point where you need to allow the apps to get access to another drive even. Just to make sure nobody will inject ransomware through the blender default cube I guess.

I have KDE on my laptop and gnome on my desktop. Beyond basic custiomization like icons, background, loading screen animation and some hot corners and shortcuts I don't feel the need to touch it and it just works.

I don't want to reccomend fedora since you need to add your own nvidia drivers. I'm looking to move to bazzite or endevourOS myself. Bazzite seems to be super easy to install and "gaming os" just seems to mean "its linux but steam and nvidia repo is preinstalled"

I tried ubuntu 15 years ago since it was the easiest. It was hell. Now linux is a more functional OS than windows is that asks the user to do even less in order to have everything working.