I actually super appreciate these videos. I’m absolutely convinced at this point that, regardless of compatibility issues, my next system will be Linux, but I have absolutely bounced off of it the last couple times I tried. Being able to see different people’s initial experiences with different distros feels pretty invaluable to me at this point. At the moment, I only have a laptop and can’t afford either a new system or for my current system to go down, though, so I’ve been hesitant about making any actual changes. That said, my laptop’s about six years old at this point and starting to really struggle, so I know it’s coming in the next year or so.

Putting linux on that thing will give it several more years. The performance gap between windows and linux just keeps growing.

I’ve heard that as well, but at this point I can’t really risk something going wrong and not working at the moment. I am tempted to give it a shot, but I need to at least make sure I have a fallback if something goes wrong.

Try out some live boot disks then. Several flavors of linux will just boot up, and give you the option to install from within the booted OS. I forget which ones lwt you change things and basically treat them like normal, but some will even carry over any made changes right through the install (if you tell it to, anyways). Then, you’ll just have to identify any critical applications you need and see if they run on linux, or have any viable alternatives that do, or worst case try to run the windows flavor through Wine or proton or so. If you need stability above all, I’d recommend avoiding the bleeding edge distros or the young ones that are changing a lot. It sounds odd, but I’ve been digging MX Linux a lot, and I’ve tried a good few flavors over the years. It’s based on Debian Stable, so it’s repos won’t be the bleeding edge, but it has that classic Debian “Just Works” going for it. The only bugs I’ve had have been issues from Wayland that also affect other distros.