Yes, Windows 11 is horrendous.
Years and years ago, I fought the good fight, full desktop Linux fulltime.
I see and hear from a lot of people it's pretty great these days though, and you can do whatever the new cool fork of WINE is or a VM for games / software compatibility.
Definitely not moving to 11. When 10 gets painful enough I'll probably try Devuan or Arch or something for desktop use.
I used Linux exclusively from 1999 to 2012. I gave up in 2012 and switch to Mac.
I’ve just switched back to Linux, and I can confirm. It’s different, it’s very different. And it’s very good. I realised how much I’ve just been fighting Apple everyday in newer versions of Mac.
I was going to ask my boss for a new MacBook Pro soon but now I’m having second thoughts.
> I was going to ask my boss for a new MacBook Pro soon but now I’m having second thoughts.
If you're looking for laptop recs, I've been happy with my Framework 16 except for one issue: when you close the lid, it can subtly flex in your backpack, press keys, and wake itself up. I work around it, but it's annoying.
But they recently announced a second build of the Framework 16 where one of the selling points is that the lid won't flex. Can't personally verify that they got it right, but given the build quality of the rest of the machine, I suspect they did.
I gave up in 2010, but on my case went to Windows 7, plus VMWare.
While I appreciate NeXTSTEP heritage on macOS, I rather have something that costs 1000 euros less with more RAM, SSD, and a GPU capable of doing CUDA and Vulkan without translation layers.
Now if my employeer or customer is willing to assign a MacBook Pro with the same RAM and storage for project activities, great more on them, I would not say no.
Similar timeframes! Any distro recs?
I'd suggest Linux Mint if you want Ubuntu with a GUI that doesn't suck, though Kubuntu is probably a decent choice (KDE isn't to my taste visually so I don't use it, but it absolutely doesn't suck and many people like it). If you want a rolling release instead because you want to live on the bleeding edge, Arch is hard to beat.
I can second Mint for a good GUI, but if you want Wayland I would probably either go for Pop!OS with the new Cosmic desktop beta or Fedora with KDE over any version of Ubuntu. Snap packages suck still IMO
I should probably mention that Linux Mint disables Snap packages by default (for reasons of principle that boil down to "Snap packages suck"), though you can reenable them with a single command if you actually want Snap. That's another point in Mint's favor for me.