Mint broke all the time for me last time i tried using it. After reinstalling it for like the 8th time, I just decided to take a break from Linux. This was like 6 years ago though.
All jokes aside. Anything you use these days is going to be pretty stable, have all of your driver's (unless it's absolutely the bleeding edge) and play steam games.
Hell Nvidia isn't even an issue anymore.
But I'll qualify that by saying I'm on a 47xx i5 and a 1060.
My wifi driver doesn't work on it. I have to plug my phone in to use it as a tethered hotspot to get it to connect. And I tried what a lot of the guides said online. Nothing.
Thanks for the recommendation. I don’t look forward to the day I’m forced to upgrade windows because that’s when I’ll absolutely need to move over to Linux. I’m just not ready for it.
I'd say I have the technical chops. I just don't have the time and energy needed to try to fix something.
I'm also the kind of person that, if everything's not working exactly the way I want it to, then I need to fix it right now. So I know I'd waste hours trying to fix something that (for me) just works on Windows.
This used to be a requirement but is now optional. For example, Mint, EndeavourOS, and PopOS all are distros that are simple to install and configure, even simpler than windows in most cases. Popos has a software store pre-installed that works exceptionally well and supports flatpaks too. Drivers work out of the box.
There are still the distros that are more complex as a rule, and you can also mess up the distros I mentioned above, but you no longer have to wade through a dark forest to get your computer running correctly for basic use.
Also if you game, the lutris and steam make it extremely easy to do. You really should try it if you haven't in a while, its impressive what those two pieces of software can do now.
I just don’t have the technical chops nor spare time to make my OS a hobby.
Windows is not immune to this, I tried to get a few years old wifi stick to work and it was a nightmare with different hardware revisions, old drivers that aren't included in windows, bluescreens and a difference between using the USB 2 and USB 3 ports.
With Linux it just worked out of the box after plugging the stick into the computer.
This is why I’ve gone back to windows on the machines I care about and don’t plan on going back. Open source software is cool, but it also kinda sucks. I’ll use Linux all day on servers. But my primary desktop is windows and my secondary desktop is Mac OS and I doubt that’s changing any time soon.
Funny I'm the opposite - I have to use Windows bullshit all day long at work. The last thing I want at home is to deal with it there - pop_os is stable and works perfect for me.