Linux

My advice is to restart with Arch (I use Arch btw). Not Manjaro, I'm talking Arch.

I think using/installing Arch as well as its barebones nature FORCES you to understand how Linux works differently than Windows with concepts like root, bootloader, terminal emulation, and disk partitioning, just to give you some examples. At the same time, Arch has excellent documentation, a great package manager in pacman, and rolling release model that greatly simplifies maintainance during daily use so you can tune it to exactly how you want it.

I believe doing it the hard way at first will make it easier for you in the long run if you really want to understand Linux, and Arch is just the right amount of difficult to make you learn Linux, whereas Gentoo would be too hard and you don't learn enough from using Ubuntu/Debian/Mint.

But yeah, if you just want to use something that works well out of the box, then Ubuntu is great, there's nothing wrong with using the more user friendly distros.

I personally finally made the fulltime switch in November 2021 after years of on again off again attempts. The one I was finally able to stick with was Endeavour OS with KDE desktop. It's basically just an arch distro with a good installer and som QoL apps. Easy to maintain and a good community if you need assistance.

And with the creation of Bottles running windows software has been surprisingly easy. I do some home studio recording and just got EZdrummer setup as a vst in Ardour, and it just works.

My advice is, learning new things can be a pleasure, so try to improve your learning skills. Everything is possible then.

I just made the full time switch to pop os and I've been happy so far

Apparently ChatGPT is really good as a personal tutor. You can ask it specific questions and it will answer with detailed tutorials and step-by-step guides.

The best advice I can give is to just use Linux. Back in early 2006 when I started switching over to Linux I would dual boot, and any time I ran into something that was hard to do on Linux I would just boot into Windows to save time. Eventually I decided to stick with it and not reboot when that would happen. Linux back then was not as user friendly as it is now, so for the most part this should be the exception and not the rule. Obviously some software is going to be Windows specific, but the best thing you can do to learn is just stick with Linux and use it.

As for distros, whatever is the most used which is probably Ubuntu right now, will be best as people will have plenty of answers and questions that will cover what you are going through compared to a niche distro. When you get more experience with Linux, you will get a better sense for what you want out of a distro like rolling releases like Arch, functional package management like with NixOS or whatever else may be important to you. So just stick with Ubuntu or whatever is more popular right now and reevaluate after you get to the point your comfortable with command line tools.

I use OpenSUSE, because it has YaST, which is basically the Control Panel in Windows. Without it, I'd have to use the terminal. It also installs on just about anything.

Get a pre-owned Thinkpad or Dell Latitude for cheap. Upgrade it if you want, especially with SSD & RAM. Get some Linux on it -- I recommend Linux Mint for ease of use.

Consider reading the content on Linuxjourney.com

Install Linux Mint in a virtualbox VM. It gets up and running so quickly, and works extremely well.

I have been focusing more on learning Linux at work, between some Fedora VMs we use for various things, and the Mint VM I spun up myself. It’s great because jumping between windows and Linux is a simple matter of moving the mouse cursor to a different monitor. I usually just leave Linux Mint running full screen on one of my monitors.

I’m not experienced with lots of distros, but Mint is damned impressive.