The switch or dual boot is up to you. I can lay out some general steps in case you want to have an overview. Please do not be scared off by it. Depending on the distro, most things work out of the box or with very little effort.

1. familiarize
   • look up some distros, I personally like to go Arch-based, but feel free to use whatever seems good and popular enough (please no Ubuntu)
   • try virtual machine and then live ISO
2. verify compatibility
   • this one is a bit more work, basically try all functionality in the live ISO, or at least things like display, mouse, keyboard, touchpad, Wi-Fi, storage
3. install
   • you probably won’t need to look into this super deep, default installers handle this pretty well
   • formatting and partitioning (look into ArchWiki guide, you probably don’t need swap partition)
   • if you are going to be reinstalling look into using efibootmgr to possibly clear up old and fix existing boot entries (i had to enable boot flag after setting up dualboot, because macOS installer overwrote the previous settings, thanks Apple :-) )
4. configure missing/not working OS stuff
   • look for missing drivers and system management software for either your specific hardware or some more general ones
   • best sources are wikis like ArchWiki (even if you don’t use Arch), forums and some software search sites like AlternativeTo
   • in some cases the software does not meet the requirements for a wiki page to be up (Xlibre being notable example - feel free to look up the whole story)
   • you may have to put some time into getting GPU fully working, since nvidia has several driver options depending on the GPU
   • I personally had to fix USB autosuspend config, only look into it if devices plugged in after boot are not being detected
5. use
   • installs and updates are done using package manager (windows has winget, btw)
   • for windows games use Wine or rather some of its forks
   • most people here already shared their recommendations for this part

edited

The fact that there is this section in the README even though all the code has docstrings and you can generate the docs is certainly interesting.

Brother distributes its own drivers, but there are some alternatives like brlaser. Both mentioned drivers work great on linux in my experience.

Maybe luakit, If you want gui. Dillo, if you don’t care about the looks. And w3m for terminal.

FreeCAD, runs on a damn potato. Fusion bakes it into charcoal instead. At least that is my experience on a kinda low-end laptop.

Also check which Wi-Fi driver is used. ArchWiki delais this nicely. Sometimes you may end up with wrong one enabled (I did with some distros in the past).

It is not your mistake. It just could be a very specific issue, misconfiguration perhaps. Even the default installer may mess up. On my machine the Wi-Fi did not work because the distro installer set up wrong driver. To be fair it probably works on most newer machines but mine works with the one that is already in the kernel (which it of course disabled). Also no audio, because driver is still in development and last time I tried it didn’t work. No hybernation because some random wake up bugs. And many tiny incoveniences, but my machine is a jackpot in that regard. Also by default Arch did not detect some USB devices plugged in after startup. Some time later I learned it was the default USB config and changed it.

My point was that just because it is the default done by the installer it may not be the default that works for all machines.

Sounds like you speedrunned distro hopping and used anything but the stuff people actually end up using. I recommend not to look at distros but the base OS. Distro is just a bunch of things on a base. Also I’ve never used Gnome, but friends who have used it eventually switched to literally anything else.

Also, never expect things to be 100% plug and play and then complain about them with no research. There is always a limit with every software. And there are always resources and guides.

I currently can’t get it working at all and had to disable it, because my machine won’t come back up. So i changed my workflow to take that into account. If I need it closed for a few minutes to move I leave it running and if the time window is greater I turn it off completely. There is always a way, my case is just very specific and I don’t necessarily need it. Anyway, good luck getting it to work the way you like.

Replace screwdrivers with hammers and you get a description of Jeremy Clarkson.

Just one note. Unfortunate names do exist. If a band has name that is also commonly used to refer to other things, it is really tricky to find them unless they are popular enough. I remember trying to find some music from a band called “6 cylinder”. You can imagine the struggle.

To be completely honest, I don’t consider any name to be bad.

You may say AxCx is terrible name, but once you give them a listen it exactly fits the name. Same goes for Hijokaidan, who are actually named based on one of fan’s suggestion claiming that “escape staircase” suits their sound more. Party Cannon is absolutely hillarious imo, when you look at the logo and the sound. Brojob also has a name that fits their lyrical themes.

In some cases the name may come out a bit lame, but bad names? Nah. I don’t consider any name bad, most of them sound either fucking epic and/or hillarious when you look at the full picture.

Come on, let musicians have some fun.

Just to put it out here. Termux has proot-distro that allows you to run qite a few distros as containers. Technically not a VM afaik. I find it useful, because it is sometimes simpler to wipe that instead of reinstalling Termux.

pacman + yay + appman (in cases where appimage is more convenient)

If you need something from AUR, Chaotic AUR builds some of them.

Technically I also use managers for certain languages and environments, so sometimes cargo, pip, luarocks, … whatever.

I did try to use flatpak in the past, but I just found it annoying. If you do not explicitly need it’s capabilities for a certain app it is mostly makes accessing app’s config and data a major annoyance imo.

Yeah, the grey looks great. Just the right ammount, imo.

Try it out with Daggerfall Unity. I heard a lot good about it. There is a way to have Steam still track your playtime with custom launch command.

In my case Tectonic (XeLaTeX with a few quirks, but error messages are actually readable) and Typst are both goto options when I want to write a document.

LaTeX is older and has currently more features. I would generally recommend it for writing serious articles and documents that need hyperref highlights for instance.

Typst still has a lot to catch up when you compare it to LaTeX, but I really like the overall document structure (except the table syntax, but I’ve seen worse) and design choices. In my opiniton, Typst has frendlier tools that just work (Neovim integration is amazing once you figure out the LSP and Tinymist).

Syntactically Typst allows faster typing, so you may use it to write notes directly during lectures.

Math parsing is a bit different, but also tends to be easier to write.

I also like that Typst works with different “elements” than LaTeX. It kinda fells more like HTML and CSS merged into one in terms of control and workflow.

Try brightnessctl. If it does not recognize it, go with some tape I guess.

I mean, trying to implement stuff yourself is great for learning. Only once you are confident enough it is worth contributing.

I do like it, but I have sadly fallen down the tiling wm rabbit hole. It’s too late now.

It has been mostly i3 for me. Not for everyone, but I like the control.