u/Justabocks

After having extra clicks to get to my right-click menu, extra clicks to save locally and not Onedrive, after reading that more IA and data collection are coming by default, and after seeing several tech channels that I follow test Linux, I finally jumped!

TL,DR: I like it, I'm staying! There's a lot to learn for sure, but it's a stimulating challenge. So this post is for curious noobs like me: don't overthink it, give it a try!

That's been roughly a month. My steps:

• (Linux Mint / Years ago, on a laptop I was selling, because I wanted to keep the Windows key / It felt easy enough, though visually rigid and dated)
• CachyOS KDE / 1 week / A big reason why I didn't jump before was gaming. Now that it's a lot better, "out of the box" distros exist, I tried it. Despite being Arch-based, the early steps were very intuitive, I learned to `sudo pacman -Syu`. I struggled with mount (I still don't get why it's not more user-friendly and unified between fstab, Dolphin, etc.), with the lack of printer support by default, with weird things like my dual boot on Windows having a different clock time now, etc. I enjoyed it still, I may go back to it, but there was maybe a bit too much tinkering for a start and with early curiosity + FOMO, I wanted to test other distros.
• Fedora KDE / 1 day / Going to a less bleeding-edge distro felt like a good next step, but with gaming in mind, vanilla Fedora had too many steps to do for me (while having lots of pre-installed stuff I didn't need).
• Bazzite KDE / 2 weeks / I stayed in the Fedora world and went the opposite route: atomic and gamer centric. I had a great time with it! It´s definitely the most accessible and stable gaming distro I've tested so far, though you do see some rigidity of the atomic architecture, which made me want to test less "frozen" OS again.
• Nobara KDE / 1 day / Nobara felt again like a logical next step then. Just I started to ponder whether KDE was also something to challenge. Up to now, I had the idea that Gnome was for people with Mac experience, and KDE for people from Windows...
• Nobara Gnome / 1 week / That took a few days to get used to it, it's different for sure, but after a few adjustements, I'm settling in! It suits most of my needs, it actually felt easier than KDE for some things (my HDD was auto-mounted?), and I find it visually classier. Gaming on Steam -as for CachyOS and Bazzite- has been a breeze. Only the app manager that failed to uninstall pre-installed apps with just a generic error message felt really bad.

Here I am. I feel grateful to be on Linux now. Linux has been my daily driver for a month now, and I'll stick to Nobara Gnome for some more time. I still struggle with simple stuff like installing apps when it is not on DNF (ex. Slack --> get the website RPM, Obsidian --> get the community maintained flatpak, etc.). I have much to learn but I enjoy getting proficient at several OS now!