Being on KDE means I am ahead of Windows.
Using MS Teams in ungoogled chromium for maximum privacy works.
I have no experience with Nvidea drivers, but I see a lot of hits at disabling the Nouveau driver. But again, this might be solved with running a more recent kernel.
It's not as simple as Windows, but my time investment to read the release notices is minimal. An other benefit is that your system doesn´t slow as your os install ages.
I personally cannot stand using Ubuntu and it seems I'm not alone in that regard. I hear nonstop issues with it from my friends who tried it and I attribute a lot of failed Linux converstions of people thanks to it.
I used Manjaro entirely because of its i3/bspwm DE versions. Ubuntu now has a good equivalent in the form of regolith. Avoid Manjaro if you care about long term system stability
Aside, don't expect switching OS-es to be a walk in the park. Most things will work as good as on windows. You'll probably have to do some custom configuration for your laptop. Tweaks for your specific laptop model will be documented on the arch wiki.
This is quite a bold statement. I'm not a developer and recently installed a number of linux distros to try which is best. Some of them were actually easier to install than Windows or MacOS. For example Linux Mint was a breeze, and I used full disk encryption and other 'advanced' settings.
I say this from the bottom of my heart as someone that loves Linux: If you have a laptop with Nvidia graphics - don't bother trying to run Linux. The experience is just miserable.
There are two major things in the way:
1) Nvidia's drivers themselves are not very good and present day-to-day problems (like screen tearing and other artifacting), especially when trying to use Wayland (the next generation window manager on Linux). This may be fixed soon, Nvidia has been finally laying the groundwork for better compatibility with Wayland desktop. Alternately, if all you need is X11, then go ahead and don't bother with Wayland, which sidesteps this problem nicely. But if you have a higher DPI display and want decent display scaling, or ever plug into an external display, unfortunately Wayland is a necessity, and currently, it's miserable with Nvidia.
2) Power management/graphics switching is a miserable experience. There is prime render offload, but it's not very intelligent. Which means you have to remember to start applications with a flag every time you want to use the Nvidia GPU, which introduces all kinds of bugs. Alternately, you can just leave the Nvidia GPU as default, but that introduces more bugs (for instance, on my XPS, it killed my audio because somehow the Nvidia GPU took over audio output and after months of trying, I still couldn't fix it). Furthermore, it completely drains your battery. This is something that is almost certainly not going to be fixed.
On desktop, Linux is 95%-99% usable. On an Intel or AMD laptop, it's the same way. But on a laptop with Nvidia graphics, it's just not worth the headache. There's no complete solution, there's only tradeoffs.
That said, I recommend openSUSE Leap as an OS, because I find it's the best of all the tradeoffs. It's very stable, there's a corporation behind it that needs to keep it running. The release cycle is nice for desktop. YaST makes things very easy to manage the PC. The only real "tradeoffs" are that you need to install AV codecs from a community repository, and Nvidia drivers from a community repository (both are easily enabled through YaST).
The trade of is that you have to love it or hate it because you can barely change anything, but it deserves to be loved. I'm back to Windows for an undetermined span of time but I'll gladly reinstall ElementaryOS as soon as I can probably pay for it.
So, listing differences with Gnome would be like comparing Gnome & KDE.
I think it’s an excellent choice for a standard desktop or laptop.
However, moving from Ubuntu to Manjaro (KDE Plasma) based on recommendation from someone on HN, oh it almost /just works/ without issues. There's just little gotchas along the way but atleast it doesn't make me want to tear my hair out like Ubuntu flavours do.
Recommend a simpler laptop that is well known to work well with Linux. There are resources out there to determine how well Linux will run on it before purchase.
I just worry about people swearing off Linux forever when they can't successfully install Linux on their Microsoft Duo Surface that just released a month ago, and then they post about the horrible time they had with Linux. In the past decade I have never had any troubles installing Ubuntu on any computer I've owned. It is plug and play most of the time! But nobody talks about when things work just fine :)
Well, Microsoft are getting rid of tablet mode in Windows 11, so soon it will be at parity :p
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoi...
I use Ubuntu, but don't do anything heavy graphical, so don't have those issues you're mentioning and it works great for me.
zorin os is another one to check out. ui is more like windows and i think it has a tablet mode
it's supposed to be "ubuntu-based", but the usability difference between the two is night and day.
- Screen tearing. I Googled around and installed the Nvidia drivers for my laptop, but it never went away.
- No detection of tablet mode.
- No auto screen rotation.
- Slow Blender rendering. Probably a PEBKAC with my driver setup, but it just worked in Windows and it was easy to select Nvidia vs. integrated graphics.
- MS Teams shared my desktop as a giant blur.
- LibreOffice is still bad and incompatible with what my company does in Office, though that may matter less with Office Online.
Is there a distro that Just Works more so than Ubuntu? I'm sure I could have solved all of the above with enough time and effort, but I'm not in a good position to do that right now.