Nothing wrong with Ubuntu, but it’s interface is definitely geared more towards Mac folks.

My recommendation for someone making the jump to full time Linux is Fedora Kinoite. It’s “immutable” meaning impossible to break, and uses KDE Plasma, which is like the modern Windows you’ve always wanted.

Again nothing wrong with Ubuntu, it’s great and will run on the hardware you mentioned, but if you are someone who wants to tweak settings without fear of breaking something somewhere else, I really recommend Kinoite.

Yeah but until two months ago Spotify was 24kbps

I wonder why Spotify and not YouTube Music, Tidal or Apple Music all of which are higher quality.

100% Also, y’know Ellen, or Will & Grace…

It always is. The thing with FOSS vs a private company is that internal debates are:

1. Public
2. Involving people working for free

Meaning we not only see the ““drama””, but that it can become more verbally intense. Buuuuut it almost never ends up mattering much to the average user, and when it does, the public certainly won’t learn about it on github or the replies to a toot.

A nas or home server with one of them is a great idea

It’s the “just works” distro for people who want to play games.

It’s been flawless for me with similar performance (slightly better in some areas) than Windows.

Very cool thanks for pointing them out, I will look into them.

Can you explain more? What are ublue scripts and what makes them so handy? I’m still new to this space.

To my knowledge Bazzite is basically SteamOS with more flexibility under the hood if you’re looking for it. By default it boots right into big picture mode. I imagine if you get an HDMI-CEC dongle it would work great as an HTPC once you get Big Picture set up with the streaming apps.

Kinoite is also great and usually what I recommend someone coming from Windows who wants a distro that “Just works”.

Bazzite is great. I wish I’d tried it sooner. It is great for a “steam machine” or just as a very stable regular desktop.

Wow he actually went with Mint and not some niche distro!

Well, it is rebellious.

As others have suggested it is probably smarter to just backup windows onto a portable hard drive, or you could do Windows2Go which is finicky but do-able.

Also you didn’t ask what distro, but I have been enjoying Fedora Kinoite it’s a very smooth transition (and improvement) from Windows.

I actually learned of this when the Material You Home Assistant addon updated yesterday. Kudos to the dev for being extremely on the ball.

Nobody is stopping you

If they are coming from Windows: Kinoite

If they are coming from Macintosh: Silverblue

This is the right answer OP!