I feel exactly the same. Not going down this route around the same time I probably would've gone Windows 7 -> Windows 10 -> Windows 11 and had to deal with all that brings with it.

Instead going fully Linux had its pain points, but the learning, exposure to everything and the experience was well worth it. Looking back, so many of the issue I ran into ~10 years ago barely exist today - at least I rarely run into those kind of hurdles either due to more experience or the ecosystem just being quite stable and mature now.

Likewise. I think moving my whole life to Linux has also benefitted my career greatly. Because of the time I've spent hacking on my personal system, squeezing out performance, fixing common issues, etc, I'm pretty damn good at doing so for Linux servers. Those skills have come in really handy for me many times.

Windows 10 almost killed windows for me, and windows 11 has been the final nail in the coffin (tested 11, but I haven’t moved to 11).

It’s too dumbed down. Settings don’t exist or are buried. The interface has gone backwards. Cloud and internet spam embedded everywhere..

The only reason I was still on windows was for gaming, and even that is mostly a solved problem on Linux these days.

My next main install is old faithful ubuntu server.

I have the same experience. In my case everything worked fine out of the box (after several test installs of Arch).

The best distro for a new Linux user is actually the same distro your best friend uses. When things get dire it's good to have a direct help (Arch Wiki is great but one needs to know how to extract most or its knowledge).

> The best distro for a new Linux user is actually the same distro your best friend uses.

100%.

Although an experienced GNU/Linux tinkerer can probably easily help you with any distro unless you're using something really exotic (i.e., it's immutable, non-GNU-based, non-FHS, or something like that). I run NixOS but I support a Kubuntu system for an older relative, and it's not really a problem.

Can't agree more, looking at what Windows has become from Windows 8 and onwards. It used to be that Windows users chose Windows over Linux because they saw it as the OS that "just lets them get their work done." No one can possibly say that about the Windows of today, the OS that gets in the way at every turn and corner to squeeze profits out of users who already paid.

I get what you're saying, but I have to say, other than "read the Arch wiki, stupid," I don't feel like I learn very much the nth time my sound stops working or my wifi just decides not to connect, even though other devices have no trouble. And, I'm saying this as someone who's typing this comment on a Linux machine right now.