I finally made the switch to Mint recently. My day to day experience is so much better. I set up a fresh Windows VM so I could keep using a few programs that don't play well with wine, and even having to purchase a new activation key for it was totally worth it to have it segregated out from my day to day. And I'd guess that not all that many people really need the specialty stuff I do.

Do a little research on what you use daily and/or can't live without, but I can confirm that it isn't as complicated as you might think.

Dude it’s so worth it. I’ve tinkered with a few distros but Bazzite was a good mostly beginner friendly set up for gamers.

Sometimes Linux can be weird with Nvidia but that’s rapidly getting fixed and I haven’t have any problem in a long time.

Do it. Don't you want to run btop and feel badass?

I put pop!_os on my surface pro 8 in an hour a week ago, having used only windows or macos for the past decade. No issues. They've upstreamed enough stuff to the linux kernel that everything except camera worked even without the surface_linux kernel. Steam runs just fine on it, as do all the games I've tried so far (obviously hardware is trash for gaming, but hey, if it was playable on windows, it'll probably be smoother on linux at this point). If linux works on a microsoft surface, there's no way that it won't work on whatever machine you happen to have.

Back up your files, pick a distro, unlock your bootloader, and just go for it. Only requirement is to know how to... Run commands in a terminal.

No regrets.

If you're reluctant because you're expecting it to be a huge pain at first while you do setup and get used to it, I found it actually easier to get things set up on Linux the way I liked them than it does on a new windows install, or sometimes even after a windows update that resets some settings to default (without saying anything other than "your system is up to date" of course). It helped that most defaults are decent. The most time taken during the install was looking up what some choices meant in higher detail.

Though I do have an AMD GPU, if you have an nvidia GPU, you'll only get that easy experience on certain distros specifically set up for that, as I understand. Other distros can work with nvidia but require more tinkering as I understand. But for me, I didn't even have to install GPU drivers. The first game I launched was more of a "wait, will this really just work without needing to install anything else?" than a "ok, time to play a game". And it did work, at least after checking the "always use proton" option in Steam.

And don't worry too much about which desktop you initially select. It's almost trivial to install and switch to another. Just be aware that cinnamon relies heavily on some form of JavaScript, to the point that my high end PC couldn't keep up with rapid mouse movement without dropping some of the updates, though tbf it wasn't a huge impact. But KDE-plasma handles the mouse way better. That's on Fedora.

One of us, one of us, one of us

For real though, find a distro that looks cool, and give it a whirl. A lot of distros have a live boot option that lets you try it out before installing. Ive tried a few myself, but I keep going back to Kubuntu. I might try bazzite soon, havent given that one a go yet!

I did it not so long ago. I don't miss Windows at all. I do still have 10 installed on my PC just in case, though.

Me too but haven't installed yet. Bought a bigger pendrive during blackfriday and just stuffed it with ventoy and a bunch of isos

Same. Got it done just before turkey day. Got to play video games on the big screen!

7.0GB per ISO

What the hell. Why so heavy

That's good you have admitted your wrongs, unfortunately, you are still required to repent upon the altar of nix

Love me some Fedora, why should I switch to an immutable version? The thing that gives me pause is I like being able to change my system when I need to and have it persist, which is from what I understand the exact opposite idea of immutables (but I may be misunderstanding, thus this comment asking lol).

Isn't fear reduction the point of them?