Sick of Windows' bugs, but frustrated by setup hassle and papercuts in Linux
I got tired of Windows. Updates would randomly mess with my performance—making lightweight things like playing Hollow Knight while watching a video stutter, even though my PC can handle way more than that. Other times, it would take 10 minutes to shut down, or fail to wake up from sleep, forcing me to hard reboot for no clear reason.
So I tried switching to Linux. My problem is that I don't really like "gaming-focused" distros, and I hate having to fix or configure things just to get a usable system. I like Linux Mint, but it gave me gaming issues, and again, I don't want to tweak settings endlessly.
Right now, I have Nobara installed, but it gave me headaches from day one due to GRUB boot issues. I had to manually fix things in the terminal. Thank goodness for AI, but typing commands into a GRUB shell while reading off my phone—with my keyboard layout defaulting to US English and scrambling all the symbols—was an absolute nightmare.
I installed it yesterday, but I barely felt like setting it up properly after that. On top of that, small annoyances started piling up:
- My taskbar wasn't showing up on my second monitor.
- I use two monitors with different resolutions, and moving the mouse between them gets "caught" at the bottom border unless I move it higher, which feels really awkward.
- Snapping windows with
Super + Arrow keysdoesn't fully maximize them properly, forcing me to use the mouse anyway.
All I want is a system where things just work out of the box without endless troubleshooting. But every time I try a new distro (Mint, Zorin OS, Pop!_OS, CachyOS, Nobara), I run into these papercuts and end up crawling back to Windows.
Is there a distro or setup that truly "just works" for a multi-monitor setup without all this manual fixing, or am I missing something fundamental about how to approach Linux?