Linux

I'd say try Kubuntu. It's like Ubuntu but with KDE (Windows-like user interface) instead of GNOME (shitty Mac clone turned tablet like interface). It's well-supported and is easy to use. Also supports new technologies like HDR which Mint is lacking. Though you can install KDE on pretty much any distro (Mint included) but it's a good starting place.

Note to fellow Linux veterans: Yes, I know snaps suck but it is not something new users need concearn themselves with. Kubuntu is a great distro except for snaps which aren't going to affect OP's use-case (or most use-cases. Also sorry for shitting on GNOME so much. If you like it that's cool, I just don't think we should be recomending it to people coming from Windows.

There is hope lots of YouTube channels, articles by bloggers such as Its Foss, and guides to Linux all over

Especially for Linux Mint (Similar to Windows), Pop!_OS (Similar to MacOS), and Bazzite (Gaming-Productivity Distro, Similar to SteamOS)

The latter 2 work out of the box for gaming if that's your thing

You got this. Learn little by little each day and engage with community as much as you can. Maybe join some Voyager for Lemmy, Bluesky, Discord, etc communities

If you want real gaming performance then arch all the way with archinstall. Trust, it's insanely good and you can get double of what you get on windows in terms of performance. Boot times are also insane. I have used so many distros and I can tell you that arch is king for performance.

Not so much help but hope: I got rid of Windows 11 and switched fully to Linux Mint a few weeks ago. I had no idea what I was doing but I tested things on USB and also on a very old laptop I had laying around before I made it my daily driver.

I'm not particularly a tech person. I own a small creative business and have a toddler, but I figured out what I needed to quickly. I don't game and didnt use Winsows exclusive software so have no opinions about that.

What I didn't expect: to actually be genuinely interested in my computer again for the first time since I was a teenager (which was not recent...). I love customizing my desktop. I love discovering new open source software. I'm learning more than I expected and it's just a totally different relationship with the tech I use every day, in a nice way. And no more BS ads / bloat when I'm just trying to exist on my computer.

A lot of people here have already given good advice. I shall add my experience, recommendation and some tips (may incidentally repeat some of them).

1. If you play some games with kernel level anti-cheat (like Rainbow Six Siege, Apex, Valorant, LoL, Fortnite, Battlefield games, Destiny 2 among others), you will have to stick to dual-boot. Check on ProtonDB for compatibility of games. I have 500+ games on Steam and pretty much everything I've played has worked so far.

In terms of other software you use, make sure you have alternatives that work on Linux.

• For Photoshop, there's Krita/GIMP.
• For Video editing, there's Kdenlive, DaVinci Resolve, etc.
• For browsing and office apps, there's LibreWolf and LibreOffice.

If you happen to have any software that you don't have a good alternative or that only runs on Windows, then you'll have to stick to dual booting.

2. If you do end up dual booting, DO NOT use your external HDD in NTFS to run games on linux. It will work for a while, but you'll constantly have to 'chkdsk' or check disk on Windows every time your HDD is found corrupted. Also, NTFS is Windows' proprietary filesystem. So, I've heard that using ntfs-fix (chkdsk equivalent on linux) might cause data loss. Not sure how far it's true, but be cautious of using that too. But otherwise, I believe that just reading files from NTFS drive usually is not a problem.

• If you are NOT dual booting however, you won't have to face this mess. You can backup the data on your HDD somewhere, format it in 'ext4' filesystem for Linux-only use ('Exfat' if you want to share any data with others on Windows/Mac) and restore all your files back to this HDD in ext4. Hope you have extra HDD with enough free space to move your files while you convert disks to ext4. You can also probably use cloud services for backup.

3. I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Arch and Fedora.

• Had faced a lot of issues with Ubuntu back in the day, and Snap Steam is a mess. So, avoid it.
• Mint is easy to use, removes snap from Ubuntu and just uses apt, has a great Desktop Environment called Cinnamon, and I'd usually recommend this to someone new, but I wanted to shift from X-11 to Wayland for security reasons and HDR support among others. If Wayland worked well with Mint, I'd still be using it today, but that was the only reason I moved away from it.
• While Arch is nice, it's certainly not for someone new.
• That leaves us with Fedora KDE, which would be my recommendation. It has good security features like SE-Linux out of the box. The reason I suggest KDE over Gnome is so that you might have an easier transition from Windows to Linux. Once you have a hang of this, you can later use a pen drive to load other distro with other DE like Gnome, XFCE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, etc and test them out by live booting.

4. Speaking of pendrives, make sure to always have one with Ventoy installed and the distribution you're using. This will be handy if you want to troubleshoot your system anytime. And I say Ventoy over others because it makes loading distro easier. You can just drag and drop the ISO files instead of having to burn with Balena Etcher or Rufus everytime.

• Rufus is great, but if you're moving out of Windows, you don't need it.
• And I have seen a lot of people have trouble with using Balena Etcher. So, avoid it.

5. • Turn off Secure Boot in BIOS. (And maybe also fast boot).

• And if your disk is on RAID instead of AHCI, you might have trouble installing. So, you might want to set your SATA configuration to AHCI mode in BIOS if you face issues.

6. If you end up choosing Fedora, you may want to follow this.

Fedora only comes with FOSS by default. So, you'll have to install Nvidia driver and proprietary multimedia Codecs separately by including RPMFusion repo.

• You can download the free and non-free repo files from the RPM-Fusion site(Graphical Setup) and install them through the Software Center. After adding the repo, you might have to enable them in the Settings of Discover Software Center. Enable all of them except those containing the words 'testing', 'Test', 'Source', 'Debug' and 'google chrome'.

• After that, it's just a few lines you type in the terminal (Konsole by default) for installing driver and codecs. Make sure to update the system and restart first before doing these.

For Nvidia driver, type:

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia

For optional CUDA support, type:

sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

For Video acceleration support, type:

sudo dnf install nvidia-vaapi-driver libva-utils vdpauinfo

For Codecs, type:

sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

Steam is also included in the non-free repo. You may install it by typing:

sudo dnf install steam

7. Other than these, most applications can now be installed directly from the store as a Flatpak. You can select them in the store between Flatpaks, Fedora managed Flatpaks and Fedora Linux app for a particular one.

• For flatpak apps, you'll see a tick next to the developer if they are verified. So, you can look out for that if necessary.
• Make sure 'Flathub' repo is enabled in the Settings of Discover Software Center for the Flatpak apps to appear.

NOTE: Every time the video driver updates, you will have to do a follow-on update for flatpak runtimes. You might see a bunch of 'Application platform' and 'Freedesktop' stuff which you'll have to install. If you fail to do this, you might suddenly find flatpak applications not working properly.

8. Troubleshooting tips:

• If Steam doesn't launch the first time, type:

__GL_CONSTANT_FRAME_RATE_HINT=3 steam

• If your system is frozen, try switching to TTY by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F3) and going back to GUI by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F2)*. *Could be F1 in some cases.

• To check what errors you got during the recent boot,

journalctl -b 0 -p err

Apart from the driver installation and some troubleshooting, you generally won't have to use the terminal if you're averse to it.

9. In terms of deGoogling, I'd recommend the following:

• Buy a pixel and install Graphene OS.

Switch to

• Tuta/Proton Mail for email,

• Proton/Tresorit Drive for storage,

• Mullvad (or i, proton) VPN or (Rethink DNS for firewall) I am not sure if you can use both Rethink and VPN at the same time. I assume there is a way.

• OsmAnd for maps,

• Newpipe for youtube frontend(Grayjay on Linux),

• Bitwarden/KeepassXC for Password management,

• Aegis for TOTP

• Fdroid, Accrescent, Aurora for App store.

• Molly FOSS for Messaging.

This post is like catnip to Lemmy users.

Back up your data and dual boot. Or just try it out from a USB stick and see how you like it.

I take it you’ve never even tried Linux before. Both of those things are not things that will hold you back. My mom uses Linux, and she barely knows what “right click” means.

With regard to your Steam games, as long as you don’t play games that use restrictive anticheat, you’ll be fine.

Check your games on ProtonDB

The only games in my library that don't work are entirely the publisher's fault for blacklisting Linux in their anticheat, and it's very few games even then.

linux mint was super easy for me to install and i haven't had to do too much troubleshooting outside of the ui :)

and i can still play most steam games (check protondb.com to see if a game works good)

1. As others have said, it's possible to play most steam games, but not all. You have to decide if you like those games more than you dislike MS and Goo. I find there's so many great games out there that I'll never get to all of them, so I'm ok with dropping some bangers that usually want too much access to my system.
2. Here's a useful resource if you need to understand slightly technical linux foundations https://linuxjourney.com/ It might not be necessary but it does help to have a foundational understanding, and honestly, the command line is awesome, powerful, and one of my favorite things about linux. Beyond having a basic understanding (and maybe having one of the books the site recommends on hand), before going to an LLM as others have suggested, have official sources of various components bookmarked and go there first. There's so much BS out there now, I actually like the fact that I can read technical documentation, test it out, and know if it's true.

one other tip: I'd recommend some kind of personal knowledge management (PKM) system to take notes. Linux gives you a lot of freedom-- that's what's great about it-- it can be complex and have a learning curve at times. It's absolutely worth it though. It's a totally different paradigm than windows. After a while you can really start crafting the whole system to your needs as an individual. I'm 3 years in and was using my first setup that whole time, i didn't realize how customized I had made it until trying to set it up exactly on a new workstation. Now I'm writing a script so to automate my setup (os settings, program installs, configs) by running a single command. Then I can really start experimenting.

Everybody's different and with a little basic knowledge, everyone's setup can be tweaked to their individual needs a little better than other "user friendly/polished" operating systems. I hope you find as much joy and freedom in it as I do.

One thing I'll say is that for a lot of distros these days you shouldn't really need to use the terminal much if ever. That being said don't be scared of the terminal. It's just another way to tell the computer what to do. It takes some learning but if you want to learn things with the terminal you might eventually find it easier/faster than using the mouse for some things. Go through some tutorials and you'll probably find out that the terminal is not that actually all that scary.

Most distros allow you to try them out before you install them. You can run them from a USB stick to let you try a few out before you settle on one. You won't be able to install any programs this way but you'll at least be able to get an idea of the interface and see if there are any you like more than others. Even still you can dual boot your PC with Windows + Linux and switch back and forth whenever you need. It's not an all or nothing ordeal. I still have windows 10 on my machine but I rarely use it now.

Gaming on Linux is better than it's ever been thanks to Steam coming with proton out of the box. protondb.com is your friend for figuring out what games you can run. That being said there are occasionally some rough edges that I have run into personally. I can run most games I want just fine but occasionally I have some issues. I'm just telling you this so you know it's not like a flawless experience. Then again I've also spent plenty of time trying to get games running on my windows PC in the past too so...

My recommendation for a first Linux OS is Ubuntu because in general it's the most popular and has the most support.

Best of luck!