If it’s any consolation, my printer’s about as old and Linux Mint seemed to just recognise it the moment I turned the printer off and on again. Might be one thing to cross off the list quickly!!

Test it by booting into a live image, no install required.

Hardware rarely seems to be the issue with major distros. I have had zero trouble with hardware for years now with a big distro like Ubuntu. Some of the smaller or lightweight distros? Absolutely, a mixed bag of hammers not knowing what will work. Usually wireless internet, but sometimes it’s something weird like an NVMe not working or some USB driver.

Software, OTOH is a really big problem, and software controlling hardware, for instance gaming gear like a joystick/throttle setup, RGB gear or pwm pumps for cooling, is nowhere near as comprehensive or user friendly, if it exists at all; and of course plenty of games and other windows/mac only software doesn’t exist for Linux or might work in something clunky like Wine.

Linux can’t do it all, but devs have little incentive to make things linux compatible. Why deal with the headache of trying to get their software to work on a bunch of different distros when Windoze and Mac are still working fine.

Dude... the Steam Deck run on SteamOS which IS Linux.

Anyway all it takes is to put a bootable usb in your pc, and check all the hardware before installing anything.

For me, it wasn’t a promise that Linux would be annoyance free. It was the simple fact that Windows had been escalating its annoyances and built-in ads to catch up.

Linux had some new annoyances, but I realized over time I just didn’t need to deal with the old ones. Keyboard shortcuts locked to the OS defaults was one; there were a lot of window management shortcuts I wanted to change or disable, and Windows simply doesn’t let you.

Anything KDE plasma will feel familiar but kinda sci-fi fancy. Or at least it was doe me.

I got Linux Mint on my laptop a few months back. Was pretty damn simple to get set up.

Feels like Windows with a few minor inconveniences like having to learn to use pinta after using paint for like 39 years

Zorin OS is geared towards people coming frim Windows or Mac wanting to maintain UI similarity. They have a "paid" version where you just pay for tech support help installing + more desktop layouts, but the free version Zorin OS core is most popular and I'm sure the community here would be happy to help walk you through it.

If you have nvidia graphics card they have support for that during installation.

Gotta take it in stages my dude and it won’t even feel daunting once you finally do it. I procrastinated for months too lol.

Stage 1: Note down the software you need to bring with you Stage 2: Do the distro decidin’ (watch some videos, read some nerd posts, whatever) Stage 3: Check hardware support, starting with your most expensive components. Stage 4: Figure out where to look for help before you’re stuck. The hardest part is that most guides start from step 1 and you probably need step 0 so don’t be scared to ask an AI for help, they’re great for stuff like this. Stage 5: Backups! Stage 6: Set aside a whole day and do the dang thing!

This is the way. Take your time and experiment.

You can always run windows on a VM within linux. You can passthrough any required hardware. And windows actually runs better in a VM than on baremetal.

Me too. I've heard good things about Bazzite. I'm planning to install Bazzite when I "upgrade" my desktop to W11. Still building up the courage to do all that.

it will lose support for windows 10 before that happens