This won’t be interesting for any longtime user but maybe it’ll give someone on the fence the courage to switch. This post includes every problem I ran into and how I solved it
I settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but I downloaded a couple more distros and loaded them into a Ventoy USB stick.
Good thing I did because despite partitioning the drive itself, the opensuse installer kept saying it said was out of space and no fix I found worked. So I booted up TempleOS for advice and the good lord whispered through my speakers, “try the Fedora KDE iso…”
The Fedora live environment booted right away. And unlike OpenSUSE, it recognized my 32:9 resolution so it looked good, too. I clicked through the installer and it rebooted. I was up and running in about 5 minutes.
The “app store” had a Steam and Discord flatpak so I could brag about my superior OS to my friends immediately. Do not install Steam this way, though (see below) EDIT: This apparently wasn’t a mistake, see viktorz’s comment below
The biggest problem I faced was with my audio interface (Focusrite Scarlett 18i8) which was recognized but hardware muted. Had to install alsa-scarlett-gui to unmute them…this was admittedly a huge pain in the ass but it’s a niche problem and it was solved.
The best biggest problem was the video drivers. My resolution maxed out at 32:9 1080@119.97hz and the screen would not wake from sleep. I ran two commands to download and install the Nvidia drivers and it worked - 1440&240hz with HDR and it wakes properly
A minor problem I ran into was Steam not creating shortcuts for games. I learned that this was because the flatpak version is siloed. Installing it “normally” solved this problem. I had already downloaded some games but was able to move them from the original folder in /var to the new one in /home. EDIT: In the comments, viktorz said a symlink would have accomplished the same thing. See what he wrote for more info
Another minor “problem” (I was prepared to lose the functionality) was my crappy Corsair mouse/keyboard. I mainly wanted to disable the default RGB rainbow but was thrilled to find CKB-Next which allowed me to change the colors and map the extra keys on my keyboard.
Anyway, I don’t know why I wrote all this. I guess I was just surprised to find how easy it was and wanted to share. I’m sure I’ll run into some headaches once I try to actually use the computer for stuff but for now, I’m quite happy with the experience.
Every headache you run into will build a few more skills as you fix it, but if you are like me, you won’t run into many more than you already have. I dropped windows for good over a year ago and changed distorts a few times but never looked back.
Thanks for sharing your experience!
I second this. When I came to the world of Linux almost 20 years ago, it was different. Games were mostly non-existent, interfaces were mostly super ugly (but tolerable), and things did not work quite often. To solve these issues, I developed a pretty solid base of knowledge that helps me in my day to day work, and life too. I just understand things much better, I guess. All that thanks to Linux. These days Linux, I’d say it just works. I run Fedora at home, and apart from some inconveniences, it was rock solid and very easy. A cherry on top, our shared home computer is mostly HTPC serving media to the huge screen, running Kodi on top of Gnome. And it has no keyboard attached! Which is fine, Gnome is quite manageable with just a mouse. I bet it would manageable the other way around, with just a keyboard.
There’s a few things I expect to run into (I’m still beholden to a lot of windows software for now) but the most important stuff is behind me!