This is just to share my experience with everyone, especially the people still undecided.
I was planning the switch for months, and finally had a couple hours undisturbed from the wife and the kids :)
It was a slightly rocky start, as my USB wifi receiver did not have native drivers, but with wired internet and the official Mint tutorial the rest of the transition was super smooth.
The OS install went flawlessly and within an hour I had all the basic programs, browser and utilities up and running. I love that I just download the app from the dedicated place, no pointless web surfing for the latest versions.
I backed up my steam folder (with the rest of my files of course), so after installing the steam client and some quick synchronization I had my installed games library back in minutes. I did some testing and everything works great. As I own a steam deck I already had some experience with games not running natively on Linux, but a saw many great tutorials for beginners. I cant wait to test out some more games!
Edit: thank you for all the positivity and great feedback! I know Lemmy users love Linux and I have to admit I feel a little bit more included :D
Who knows, maybe I will start warching Star Trek next…
I mostly play older games on my Ryzen 5 2400g with 16gb of RAM and an RX 580 I bought off a crypto miner, though I did manage to get Starfield running at 1080P in Win10 with a framerate and detail level that doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. Still, I think I should be pretty undemanding for the current state of Linux gaming, and I’m just about ready to bail on Windows but haven’t yet. Currently dual booting with Kubuntu.
Beyond a few stubborn games, I have Windows CAD software I think I could run in a VM with maybe 8GB of RAM and access to my GPU. What’s the easiest way for a motivated amateur to get that set up? Having come up with MS-DOS, I am comfortable with a CLI conceptually, and I can copy and paste commands like a mofo, but I generally don’t know the exact use and flags well enough to do much on my own beyond apt and mkdir. :-)
There really isn’t an easy way. You’d have to run the Windows VM within Linux then assign the PCI device (your GPU) to the VM. Look up gpu passthrough if you really want to dive into it. I find it much easier to just throw a second drive in the machine for a Windows install and dual boot. If you want to dual boot with Windows, make sure Linux is installed first and on a different physical drive, unless you want to be sad later, and by sad I mean learn how to unfuck your Linux install after Windows overwrites the bootloader due to some random update.