Man the Linux propaganda is STRONG on Lemmy. I'll say what I've said before: I use my computer for gaming, web browsing, and managing a media server for my family that hosts pictures and other things. If those 3 things can be done easily without issue on a Linux distro without having to fuck around with configs every time I want to do something, I'm all in. By what I've heard though it's just not there yet. I am super happy Steam decided to go Linux for their Steamdeck though as I've heard thats helped make monumental strides the right direction. Trust me, I want to. Large part of it is I worked tech support for over a decade and having to troubleshoot my own shit is like the furthest thing I want to deal with haha
Just going to say, I do those things too, on Linux, and while I can't say I never have to mess with config files, it's not frequent. And, the computer acting like it's my computer rather than on loan from a megacorp is nice.
It's not all the way there yet but it's so very close and the bits that are still pain points aren't nearly as bad as the pain points of Windows.
As the other commenter said, you should give it a serious try. Mint is very smooth overall.
You owe it to yourself to try it out! I recommend dual booting into Linux Mint Cinnamon for a while and have your windows install to fall back on to. That or one of the gaming-specific distributions, but from what I’ve seen Mint does all with gaming too. It’s a good all-around starting place, and there are a lot of resources because it’s popular and built off of the most popular distro. I installed it on my work machine (software engineering) and I’ve felt no lack of capability or a need to switch to a more “hardcore” distro.
Proton DB is the place to go. But I don't check 99% of games I play, unless it's going to be an expensive purchase and I want to check before I buy. I also don't bother with people's suggested tweaks on proton db unless I actually personally experience issues. The only game I've had to tweak so far has been cyberpunk 2077.
Edit: added context, I'm on 2 monitors and one of them is an ultrawide. Never had any issues that aren't similar to issues I've experienced on Windows in the past.
Hey I will give my anecdotal recent experience. Several months ago I switched to Pop! OS and have had basically no issues. I have an Nvidia GPU and I play a lot of games. I don't play any games that are blocked by anti cheat (not because I can't, I just don't happen to play the few that are blocked).
I spent the first day getting everything signed in, installed, set up and tweaked to how I like it with very minimal terminal usage. Mostly gui and clicking.
Steam+Proton along with lutris makes it easy to play any game for me.
Side note: I have 4 monitors of varying resolution, size, orientation and refresh rate and it hasn't caused problems other than the initial setup (I used cursr to help with this)
Oh God I didn't even think about monitors. I only have one but it's the stupid big ultra wide by Samsung. I honestly play most games in windowed. Wondering if there's resolution support on the actual os though. The rest is like...5120 x something.
On corp side and personal if you don't have One Drive setup MS will spam notifications to set it up, and when you go to save will try to default to One Drive as opposed to local.