after trip-digit linux installs in the past year or so, here's my list for a seamless transition for people escaping windows/macOS who need to get work done:
1) don't tailor linux to your hardware, do it the other way around. get hardware that works OOB. no nvidia. no latest hardware. no weird realtek chipsets in budget deal-of-the week e-waste, no gaming (i.e. nvidia) laptops.
that don't mean breaking the bank, a thinkpad with 8th gen or newer CPU can be had for $100ish; add $50 or so to expand RAM and storage and that covers like 90% of use cases. a competent all AMD desktop a gen or two behind current tech that can game almost anything can be easily assembled for less than $400.
fedora and adjacent forums are littered with cries for help about stuff breaking or not working at all; 90% of those are nvidia related. can you make it work - absolutely. is that something you're willing to dick around on a deadline - hell nah.
2) no theming. no icons, no fonts, no plymouth screens, nada. as few extensions/plugins as you can, run it as close to stock as possible. shit's gonna break, this is a work device, you can't afford downtime because the single dev maintaining the thingy hasn't updated it for the newest Gnome of Plasma. Gnome don't feel like macOS? you'll get used to it; muscle memory is a removed but it's a tameable one.
an additional moment, especially if you're on a laptop, is to make the thing as fungible as possible. that's an easily breakable/losable thief-magnet, you want a setup that can be reproduced with as little fuss as possible so you can be operational again.
3) don't dual/triple/whatever boot. that's an advanced scenario, it's gonna break eventually and if that's a device you depend on for work or education, you don't want any of that. run it as a single OS occupying the whole disk; encryption on a mobile device is mandatory. if you absolutely need multiple OS, a 2nd device is stupid cheap and it compartmentalises your shit, i.e. one for work, one for private/gaming, etc.
4) no weird distros. no arches, no gentoos, no immutable thisisthefuture shit. when it becomes mainstream, we'll switch. until such time, middle of the road - fedora for newest hardware, mint for ancient stuff, ubuntu for everything else. a lot of people made sure they're operational OOB, it's less likely stuff will break and if it does, there's an army of folks who asked and answered whatever's bothering you.
5) no weird DEs. wayland only, gnome for laptops and tablets, plasma for desktops, there is no third option. you're transitioning from an infinitely polished UI and the best tech that money can buy, you want the closest possible experience and the widest used environment, worked on by the largest dev community aware of the widest possible usability issues, working towards fixing/implementing them. you're already relearning shit, invest that time wisely.
6) separate your system stuff from your applications as much as possible. purge all user-facing apps, like firefox and media players and such from the system's package manager (apt or dnf) and reinstall them from flatpak. that was a headache a few years ago, nowadays almost everything works OOB on wayland. the apps include everything they need to work, the setup is easy to maintain and recreate, upgrades are better (no reboots necessary) and all your settings and data are in one place.
this covered 90% use cases of 90% of the users I've dealt with. naturally, edge cases are gonna have a bad time - you want to ollama this and that and rock bleeding edge hardware and have a normal desktop experience? it's gonna hurt. you need mac-like power management and days away from power? doable but that needs work.
remember, this is a work device. for the same reason you don't decide to "upgrade" the suspension on the car that's supposed to get you to work the morning of, you don't mess with what's likely the only device you need for work/education.
greybeards dunking on you because you're not a "real" linuxer? enamoured with the spicy screenshots from linuxporn? get a $20 thinkpad and go wild - arch it, sway it, have the scrolling text on boot, rice it till it bursts. but leave your workhorse be.
I have this hardware setup with 64gb ram. I installed ubuntu 24.x and it all worked out of the box. i use X11 (not wayland) and xfce window manager. Almost all games i play work in steam. i can dual boot to win 11, but have notin months.
Are you fuckin kidding me hahahah that's awesome info. I was really under the impression from this post that my conviction to tell windows to fuck off was guna cost me more money than I anticipated. It really can get annoying to someone actively trying to learn more about IT shit and you run into one of the people who go way over the top bashing something IT related before you have a chance to learn about whatever it is they're bashing.
Like I read this lengthy write uo by OP and really thought I was getting valuable feedback that would affect how I went about this project. All the while you come alpng with a short little comment about your current empirical feedback that puts it all to ease. Thanks for that, seriously.
OP has good advice here. I agree with most of it.
Especially making sure hardware works BEFORE buying it, instead of fighting it get it to work after. If it does not work out of the box, don't use it.
I have not themed for years, and now days I always keep things vanilla - so that things are easy to recreate, and work the same from machine to machine.
I have always dual booted, but like I mentioned, I really never go to Windows. You could always run windows in a VM too and do hardware pass-though, but I just dual boot.
I agree about staying away from weird distros (for beginners at least). I always suggest Ubuntu as a first distro, as that has tons of docs and is probably the most user friendly - between its out of the box install, its online docs, the wealth of online questions, and how it is always supported (if the app supports linux in the first place). Later you can dive into the dark world of distros.
I personally stay away from Wayland. It has been "odd" and "finicky" for me, consistantly. Most things work, and some things are just a disaster. I know everyone will freak out about this comment, but in my experience things just work way better in X. Like for instance when I use Wayland with different DEs, they all have some sort of braking issues - which is probably why OP suggested staying away from them with Wayland. I prefer options.
Ubuntu uses these things called Snaps, which are kind of annoying, but work fine (not really that slow) if you are using a beefy machine, so I don't bother trying to change anything.
Advice to someone JUST getting into Linux, do all the crazy things. Install everything until the machine does not work anymore. Rebuild. Rice. Distro hop, etc - if you are techy and LIKE that stuff. If you just want a stable OS and don't care much about Linux, Ubuntu works just fine.
Advice from someone that has used Linux since 1995, as I got older, I learned not to bend a distro to myself, but rather to bend to what the distro wants. Do it the way IT wants, and don't fight it. This is really with all IT stuff. The more vanilla you stay in a distro (or any software), the more stable and the easier it will be to upgrade later. This was learned from years of rebuilding and re-configuring over and over again. Eventually I realized that if I had just gotten used to the "way it was", then next install would be exactly the same as last.