Linux

Absolutely go with bazzite, I have 15 years of experience and am willing to do unlimited troubleshooting for free if you message me on matrix.

as for why bazzite? it's immutable, which means there's a core set of stuff that is read only and can't be broken, which is massively beneficial for new people and is very up to date, and has the fixes for certain patent related stuff built in (fedora doesn't as do any other american based distros) that make twitch and some other websites work properly out of the box

Bro you're messing with wine prefixes? You already know more than most and clearly have the motivation and ability to do what you want. You'll go far, just google what you need when you need it like the rest of us :)

I was in your shoes last year, OP.

I first installed Mint (because everyone recommended it as the newbie distro) on a laptop that I took with me on summer vacation, to see if I can do some summer course work and finals on it. It worked flawlessly for that. Then I installed Steam and the paw patrol game for the kids, with controller support, and again everything worked flawlessly.

This basically gave me the confidence to just axe windows on my home desktop and fail horribly over and over again to get Arch working. Until I didn't. I'm still Linux illiterate, but the Arch wiki, their IRC channel and duck.ai & asking every available LLM through it for consensus, helped a ton with resolving anything I have encountered. I'd probably go for something more stable though next time.

So yeah tl;dr try on old laptop first for a month, then switch your main PC.

Switching to something else because you've had it up to here with existing is a bad reason. Your mind is biased and loaded for prejudgement.

Linux Mint is the obvious "newbie" choice, and not just because everyone says so.

Now, I'm no Linux expert, but Mint is great for the huge amount of tutorials availiable. The catch is: most of them aren't aimed at Mint itself, but Ubuntu or Debian, from which it "inherits" a lot. So, if you have a problem and can't find a fix for Mint specifically, chances are one aimed at Ubuntu (or even Debian) will work flawlessly.

Additionally, GenAI chatbots impress me with how helpful thay are. Just by asking them how to do stuff will teach you a lot.

I highly recommend you save the info which seemed most useful somewhere for future reference. In my experience I had to do a few dozen things repeatedly and ended up remembering them. They're mostly simple commands like apt install, apt update, apt upgrade, cd and my favourite <app_name &> which opens the app invoked without "hijacking" the terminal.

As most in the Linux community say, some things are lightning-fast to do in the terminal once you know the proper incantation.

As others said, the Mint install is incredibly simple, and much faster than the Windows one. You don't need a guide, just reading the on-screen prompts and instructions will guide you through it. During the install I highly recommend checking the "Install proprietary drivers" box because depending on your exact hardware, some things (especially Nvidia) may not play well without it.

You will be able to do almost everything without the terminal, although many tutorials do utilize it, so using it is pretty much inevitable at some point of your Linux journey.

Now, some hearsay: I've heard that Windows doesn't play nice with dual boot (although I've never experienced it fist hand), so you should back up your files just in case.

But, before you do that: For starting, if you've got the time, I'd recommend getting an old machine to dip your toes into Linux on it first without fully committing. I'd recommend you do this even though you have the Steam Deck since there are some differences between SteamOS and Mint, so it wouldn't hurt to try.

I'm in a very similar situation like you are. I too have started to be annoyed with the Big Tech products and the Internet in general.

I have switched to Lemmy, shut down my gmail account and opened a Proton Mail, and switched from using Google search engine to Qwant.

I too have switched to Linux Mint, and I'm loving it. TBH my IT colleauges talked me into buying refurbished Thinkpad laptop and told me to install Linux Mint. Boy am I glad I did that.

The next step for me is switching to Fairphone :D

Mint is a safe bet, I would also suggest you have a look at Pop! OS and CachyOS once you feel a bit more comfortable with Linux and are curious at all. They have a bit more cool stuff to offer that you don't really get from windows imho

I really like Debian. There's a version of Linux Mint called Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) that I recommend for people new to Linux. My wife has been using it for about 6 months.

The easiest way to install is by using the live image on a USB drive. I recommend installing Ventoy on the USB first if you like the idea of having a dedicated USB for boot images. Totally not necessary, but can be useful.

Here’s a nice pic that make you feel less “lost” about how some popular distributions relate to each other:

Linux Mint. Easy to set up, reasonably easy to use, and used by enough people that a quick internet search should probably turn up results of people who have run into similar issues if you ever have a problem.

The best advice I can give you is to switch to Linux is don't right away. Switch the applications you use to open source or Linux compatible alternatives that also run on windows. Then after you get used to those on windows then make the switch.

I would also recommend not dual booting at first since it's too easy to jump ship at the slightest issue vs sticking with it to figure out the issue just like you would with a problem on windows. It's a real thing I have experienced it in reverse as a long time Linux user that tried Windows 11 i kept jumping back to Linux every time I ran into issues that caused frustration.

Reguarding apps, you said typewriter, movies, music, games. Office suite look at LibreOffice. Movies and music if it is online just Firefox or any other browser you choose. Firefox is good at working with PDFs too. Any distro should come with a document viewer, photoviewer, video player, and music player. You can choose from tons of other or more advanced tools. Debian for example comes with over 60K packges and Ubuntu and Mint are similar. There are also 3rd party sources too. Flathub or Snapcraft for example if you want something not in the repos.

If you go with a Debian based distro with a lot of apps in the repos, you probably my not need these other app souces, but some people like smaller distros, something special just not in the repos, or a newer or different version of app. For example I use Joplin which is a notes app that is not in the Debian repos.

For apps finding an app name and starting links https://alternativeto.net/ is your friend. For distros, https://distrowatch.com/ is your friend. Strongly favor a distro in the top 10 on distro watch unless you have some special need.

Edit: You will notice that the top 10 are all Debian, Arch, Fedora, or SUSE based in that general order of more to less popularity. Linux distros tend to be based on these base distributions. For example Mint is based on Debian and so is Ubuntu.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=linux

Arch and Mint are the two most-used distros (Arch with double the Mint users) behind SteamOS(Steamdeck).

Installing Arch from the install medium is daunting for people so I'd recommend EndeavourOS. It's Arch but using a graphical installer and sane defaults for a desktop PC.

It seems intimidating because there's a lot of new terms and workflows seem to always involve the terminal. Learn to love the power of the terminal, don't be one of those "I use Linux but am scared of terminal commands" people.

If you've figured how to use wine then you're capable of searching your way to any solution I'm Arch (it's probably on the Wiki).

Probably Linux Mint. If you have a hardware support issue on Mint, Fedora.

Since you are already familiar with the Steam Deck, I would go with a distro (that's Linux-speak for version) that uses KDE Plasma, as that's the desktop environment used by Steam OS. My recommendation therefore is Bazzite or Aurora. Both OSs are developed by the same team using the same core technology. Bazzite is more "gamer focused" (a.k.a. they are pre-installing steam) while Aurora targets more of a developer audience. But I would argue that the differences are, at the end of the day, mainly cosmetic. Aurora is still pretty noob friendly and you could still develop on Bazzite.

Both systems are "Atomic" which basically means that a system update can't screw up your system. And if you screw something up, then you can "rebase" the system which reinstalls the OS but keeps all your data and installed apps*. It uses flatpak with flathub as its appstore so you have the same apps available as on the Steam Deck.

Now for the downsides: Some apps are a bit harder to install. Mainly apps that need deeper system access such as vpn apps can take a couple more steps to install here than on other distros. There is also no live system. Many distros have a "live mode" where you can test the system before installing. This allows you to check if your hardware is supported. Aurora and bazzite don't have that.

Lastly the userbase is growing, but other disros such as Mint are still more popular. You therefore might find less specific documentation and tutorials on the internet for it than with other options.

*Technically it's more complicated than that, there are edgecases of apps that don't survive a rebase, but don't worry about that.

I second Linux mint. It's my daily driver and I love it. I first switched my laptop which wasn't much daily driver to mint and when I got used to it I switched my main desktop.

Sounds like Linux Mint would be a good start for you

make it as easy for yourself to reinstall as possible

https://distrosea.com/ After following some of the recommendations here, you can look into this website to gets first look and feel for the distro before downloading the live USB.

Linux Mint DE will be the easiest transition.