I think you need a good baseline amount of spite and resentment for windows and/or mac.

I don’t intend to be abrasive, but this post feels like… bait?

I know it’s not.

But still. OP posted few specifics of what they actually do on their computer, nor what their hardware is, nor specific problems, and is not responding to any comments thus far. But “what distro should I use?” is Lemmy catnip. It’s absolutely guaranteed to get a lot of engagement.

It’s also been asked many, many times. If OP is curious, there are literally thousands of comments to sift through on Lemmy alone.

If this was Reddit, I’d say it’s a bot account farming karma for authenticity. But that doesn’t makes any sense, as there’s no engagement incentive like that here on Lemmy.

So yeah. Apologies for impoliteness, I meant nothing personally, but OP, there are many threads like this, and you’d get much more tailored suggestions with a little more specificity.

With a specific mix of spiteful grumpiness toward windows and a naive optimism, born of youth and abundant nerd resource at university.

That and a stoic acceptance that shit breaks, but it also broke on win 95, 98, XP and especially millennium edition. Which is the timeframe I switched in.

Going full time was fully enabled by reliable virtualization. When I could run a win XP VM and expect no issues in a work day, I was about to ditch windows as my main OS. Over time, I used fewer windows only applications, now I barely need the VM.

It’s very simple.

You simply switch your apps too, not just the OS. Everyone thinks that they can switch the OS 1:1, but it’s not like that. You will never be happy if you expect the same apps on all the OSes. Instead of photoshop, you use Gimp. Instead of Illustrator, you use Inkscape. Instead of resolve/premiere, you use kdenlive. And so on. You will have to invest some time to relearn not just the OS, but the apps too.

I think I’m pretty knowledgeable with Linux and I still have to dual boot win10 for Cyberpunk 2077, not because it’s can’t run on Linux but I lose more than half of my fps on Linux because I have nvdia GPU… There’s nothing I can do about it until either nvdia fix their driver or nvk driver become as good or better than the proprietary driver.

if you dual boot, something that helped my transition was intentionally adding friction where I wanted to try something new. For example, set your default boot OS to your Linux distro, that way you have to make the choice to intentionally select Windows every time you need it

If you can stand Windows a bit longer maybe learn FOSS alternatives tp the programs you use on Windows that are also available on Linux before switching. I did that, replaced almost everything I used with open source variants and then switching to Linux wasn’t hard anymore. I distrohopped a little but have settled on Bazzite. I’m not that much of a gamer but having NVDIA drivers and lots of other nice stuff included paired with an immutable distro is perfect for me. No fear of borked updates anymore (haven’t had one for years on other distros as well but updating was still always a bit scary. With Bazzite that happens in the background anyway, most of the time I don’t notice it)

In the 90s, QBasic (IDE) and Edit didn’t work on Slackware. So, I tried Pico, Vim, and Emacs. Now, I still use Emacs.

Dual Boot with Linux Mint - you’ll got everything you need, including printer and scanner cooperation

Download, install, use

I think you should first figure out why you aren’t sticking with Linux and go from there.

I just use kubuntu at this point. It works as well as works and feels how I want it to. I don’t need anything super fancy or customizable. Kubuntu hits that sweet spot for me.

The ideal thing to me is if you have your last pc. You throw linux on that (I recommend zorin) and you have it available alonw with your newer windows machine. In most cases I believe the linux machine will perform better. Move as much as you can to it until you have whatever little things you still need windows for. Ideally you realize you need windows for so little that you flip the script and change your newer machine to linux and windows as your backup or you put linux on your next machine and the older windows machine sticks around.

As with any change, it will always include some gains and some losses. Until you are at peace with these you won’t be able to make the change.

My first suggestion would be to find alternatives to these windows-only softwares and learn to use them while you’re still on windows. Play the shit out of the windows-exclusive games you play until you get bored of them.

The choice of linux distro doesn’t matter as long as you go with one of the big ones (Debian, Fedora, Arch linux). You will run into issues anyways, might as well go with a distro you will easily find google results for.

Personally, I found steamOS to be user friendly and has great video game compatibility (as long as you have compatible hardware). There will be endless Linux users suggesting better options, but it got me away from windows, so I suggest it.

Personally, I dual boot with an external NVMe drive. It works great! I have Linux and only Linux on the internal drive and Windows gets relegated to an external one.

The trick to getting it to work is: you have to temporarily install the NVMe drive internally in order to install Windows onto it. Then you pop it into an external enclosure and it just works. Just make sure your BIOS is set up to boot USB devices before internal drives.