Don’t use linux with the expectation that it works like windows. If you want to use linux, be open to new ways of doing things, and you will likely have a great time, try the old methods and you will run into impassable walls.
This is such an underrated comment. Linux hates, hates, hates NVidia. I've spent ~24 hours trying to get two applications running, both of which consistently complain about my GPU and Hardware Acceleration.
If you switch to Linux you’ll probably have to learn at some point to use the terminal but with some recent developments (new fonts, ligatures etc…) console applications evolved to be more and more … Graphical! And this is awesome: check out btop, neovim/nvchad, lsd etc…
Always put your filesystems in an LVM volume (and in general, partition disks with LVM rather than partition tables)! You never know when you might need to combine multiple disks, make a snapshot, add redundancy, or transfer to another disk without unmounting. But it’s very difficult to format a block device as LVM once you can’t erase its contents.
Make your /boot partition at least 500MiB.
Leave at least 1GiB of free space at the beginning of every disk. You never know when you might need to add EFI and boot partitions to that disk. And again, it’s very difficult to do after the fact.
Leave at least 1GiB of free space at the beginning of every disk.
Shouldn’t be needed these days. With GPT/UEFI you can just make more partitions at the end of the disk if needed. Back in MBR days that wasn’t possible, as BIOS often needed things to be at the start of the disk to be found.
When you’re just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don’t look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don’t distro hop just to see what you’re missing.
Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you’re trying to get work done.
Is Pop!_OS really that popular? I started using Linux about 10 years ago and it wasn’t around then, so I never tried it in my distro hopping days. I see it’s developed by System76 so I can see why you’d choose it on their hardware, but is there any point doing that on other hardware?
Snaps are basically Ubuntu’s private app store, and flatpaks (the supported method of app distribution by almost every other distro) are not supported; there’s no tiling WM built-in for large monitors; the kernel is not kept up to date (i.e. improved hardware coverage and support); some things like streaming with OBS studio and Steam don’t work out of the box (this may have changed, but it was the case for me about a year ago).
The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I’ve never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).
That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of “opinionated” good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it’s easy to go along with the “happy path” and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines–including machines not of their own brand. (I’ve contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they’ve always sent it through a code review and QA process).
The 1:1 windows:Linux replacement is just a means to keep you on Windows. Once you learn Linux, you’ll come to understand how much of a farce it is and how it’s designed to keep you away