I mean, they didn’t exactly provide support for the original argument, so I don’t expect the dissent to provide support either… both are just funny opinions

Yup, at the end of the day, do whatever works. I’ve never had to mess with hybrid graphics but I’d imagine some distros handle it better, as you found. PopOS is great and their next update should he real sweet (they’re developing their own Desktop Environment in-house).

Yeah this pretty much sums up where I landed after like 8 months of Linux desktop usage. The only reasons I ever boot back to windows is Valorant (which also requires me to turn Secureboot back on… I should just stop playing that game) and whenever I need to compile programs for Windows. But I’m gonna fix that second problem by turning an old laptop into a Windows build machine that I can access remotely.

Honestly, I’d say overall my experience with Linux desktop has actually surpassed Windows. KDE just runs snappier in every way and the app ecosystem you can access via flathub is so vast and polished. Everything feels like it has a lot of care going into it. Windows-only programs with no good Linux alternatives still exist, but for my use case I no longer have that problem.

https://nobaraproject.org/ Nobara is EXCELLENT. It took me weeks to tweak my last distro to get to the point that Nobara is out of the box, and GloriousEggroll sets it all up and keeps it updated for everyone.

As for dual booting, you should be able to follow any online guide (and the Nobara installer might even have an option for it). The only caveat is Nobara does NOT support secure boot, so you may have to disable that in your bios (you can google the benefits of secure boot, I find that for a stationary desktop in the hands of any reasonable user, it’s not necessary. Only reason I ever turn it on is to play Valorant on Windows 11 🙃)

Just in case no one comes along with a better answer; I would say it’s just too niche a use-case to expect a whole distro to be maintained for it. A super stable/popular distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint will be easy enough to use that I would consider downloading all the apps you’d need for writing to be feasible for a “non-technical” person. i.e., just as easy (if not easier, thanks to Flatpak) as doing so on Windows.

TikTok really doesn’t perform that much more data collection on their apps than Google does, if at all more. Sure, data going into the Chinese government might be a bit more concerning, but I’d say most if your argument is dangerously close to Chinese fear-mongering.