I really can’t answer that either I’m afraid, as I’m using one of the “gaming distros” (Garuda Linux) and just haven’t had anything but good luck with it really. I tried Bazzite on my laptop, but was having some nvidia driver issues and decided to try Garuda before diving into trying to fix it and, well, Garuda “just worked”. The last general use distro I used was Manjaro probably 5ish years ago and I hated it, had nothing but troubles (and have since learned that Manjaro is kind of notorious for falling apart).

you have to change the init configurations for every single game you download (even if it’s just for enabling gamemode)

I haven’t had to do this for a single game I’ve played. Am I lucky? What does “gamemode” do? (Am I missing out on something?)

The worst I’ve had to do to get a game to work was change to “Proton Experimental” in the compat settings for one game that had basically just launched. (I also remember the EA launcher being terrible when I played “It Takes Two” with my partner, but I don’t remember what was terrible about it and also remember them having problems on Windows so I don’t know if it should count or not, lol). My partner is still using Windows, and we game together a lot, and honestly I think they have games crash far more often than I do. Games take longer to launch for me though - “Processing Vulkan Shaders” takes up to a minute or two if it is the first launch since boot of a larger game. No idea what happens if I skip it, so I don’t.

It’s honestly been such a breath of fresh air, I am so grateful for the talented people making this shit work so well, especially in the last several years.

That “about” page is fucking wild. They spend like half the page sucking themselves off over how great of a job they did designing their own logo, and then the other half telling the user the proper way to reference the company and its products. I really want to spend some time on the live chat breaking all the rules, like not capitalizing every letter of their name…

Welcome! So happy to see new converts, and even more when they have an “it went well” story!

I’ve been using that for ages to share my screen, but it doesn’t bring over the audio which can be annoying, but otherwise works great. I am sure there are ways to get the audio into it, but it felt like it would be more trouble than it was worth.

I disagree with dual booting at the early stages. I like dual booting (or even better a VM if that covers you) once you’ve figured out what works and what doesn’t (assuming something vital is in the “doesn’t” category); but, if you are trying to decide if it is right for you, I don’t think it does you any favors to be able drop back into old habits so easily. My recommendation is drop a bit of money on a second hard drive, pull the windows drive out and install just Linux. See if it works for you, if your “must-haves” are running painlessly or not. You still have the safety net if things go REALLY badly of just popping in the old windows drive and changing your boot options in the BIOS, but you will be less tempted to just boot Windows every time you use the computer - until you really have to.

For a start, in practice you aren’t likely to actually reboot and load into a different OS very often. You can’t really give something new a fair shake while you are still spending most of your time somewhere else. Minor things, like how you like your system to look/work will just push you back to windows because it’s easy and you won’t ever look at the options to find out that it can do what you want (and likely more). Second, there is the pesky windows updates that likes to fuck with the boot loader.

This is really only advice for an enthusiast that really wants to try Linux. I know some will disagree - everyone’s experiences are different, but it is definitely my preferred methodology and helped me make the leap.

Am I the only one that pronounces it swa-penis and giggles every single time?

It looks like the installer in the background of picture 2 is seeing sda6, what issue is it having, can you post a screenshot of that whole window without other windows on top?

What did you use to create the partition? Free space that is listed would be space that is not formatted or allocated in the partition table at all, it doesn’t really know if that space is available to take or is being used.

Also, having the partition (probably the entire drive actually since you’ll need to edit the partition table) mounted while you are trying to edit the partitions can cause issues.