Linux

I see you're using KDE (I love it too), have you had a look at KDE Connect? It's an app to connect your phone seamlessly with KDE, and it's one of the things Linux does way better than Windows

For gaming, I would add Heroic Games Launcher for Epic Games ang GoG titles. Otherwise a great summary. Welcome back to Linux! I made the switch a couple of years ago and have not had Windows installed on any of my computers since.

I started with Arch too! Thinking in drop it only if is for Artix or ParabolaOS

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There are quite some comments and to clarify all misunderstanding regarding Arch vs something else or any other debates in this thread, I would like to add this comment.

I do not recommend Arch based distro over Debian based or anything else. Topic is about using Linux at its current state, I assume that most of distros will be more or less similar when it comes to statements of the post. In my case it was Archlinux distro, because I had prior experience and it's philosophy is appealing to me. Like rolling release, configure yourself, install only necessary for you things and etc.

I do not recommend to use Arch itself for a new user. I hope from the post it was clear, that new user should not care much about mentioned topics, like Pipewire vs Pulseaudio or Wayland VS X. One can use more high order distros or even different base, like Linux Mint. Which I also used long time ago and was quite happy about.

I do not say that KDE is better or worse than Gnome or whatever. For me it's just a preference, like possibility to have more control over UI and looks and to avoid some blockers, like DRM on Wayland. You can have them all on your machine, beauty of Linux.

And please do your own research on the topic and do take everything with grain of salt. There are a lots of great distros, desktop environments and other things. And there are tons of good and bad advices, navigating through which sometimes is not so easy.

And I would like to underline that there are not so many up to date objectivly better things when it comes to software, pick what you need and like.

Glad to hear. Few remarks that I hope will help. I'll start with Wine to clarify it's a clutch. Sure it's a useful one but IMHO the beauty of Linux is that you are in control, you have more agency. Wine per se is great because it gives you more options. Unfortunately most of the time Wine is used to run what is not available in Linux and that is usually not open source. Consequently you bring with you little black boxes, spaces where you lose again control. The deeper problem IMHO is that you assume there are no alternatives. In truth in most cases there are numerous alternatives, they just aren't clones because having more freedom to explore means they can be genuinely new solutions with interfaces that are thus unfamiliar. So... yes enjoy Wine but I'd suggest to take just a bit of time to search and try open source alternatives. This lead me to an example. I work in VR so when you mentioned desktop view I thought it was interesting. Yes you don't have whatever M$ is proposing (honestly used it years ago with WMR but can't even recall it) but you have "simple" things like ALVR (I even use SteamVR on Steam Deck) and IMHO deeper explorations like XRdesktop https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xrdesktop/xrdesktop that allow you to manipulate actual windows in space, not "just" on a 2D plane. Anyway enjoy the discovery it's a worthwhile adventure. I work and play, VR or not, on Linux for years now, it's literally liberating!

I always thought that arch was more difficult to get started w due to my experience with it from 2003/2004; it was MUCH more difficult to install and use than red hat or Debian at the time because both only required an installation cd and the ability to click on "ok"

It's nice to know it's gotten better, but I'm an old fart now and you'll have to pry Debian out of my cold dead hands before I'll consider anything else. Lol