Pop!_OS (Linux)

Games seem to be the thing that holds people back. I think it definitely depends on what games you play as my experience has been pretty smooth. A little tinkering .. but it's a new OS so that's expected. Check out protondb.com to keep an eye on games you play to see what their playability is like.

Having said that .. it's been about 3 weeks and I only needed to boot into Windows for a few hours when Ubisoft Connect got an update and broke proton compatibility. Blizzard is now bringing lots of games to Steam which will also help a ton.

I have a Windows desktop for gaming so that was a non-issue for me. As mentioned in another reply, laptop-specific things like power consumption and lid closing work as expected. Plus, it's just painless to use overall. With other distros there was always something.

Can't play the games I want. Destiny 2 is the holdup currently.

Have you tried dual booting, and trying to switch?

I set up a dual boot with Windows 10 and Mint on my PC. I found that I was sticking with Windows because it was what I knew, but then an update broke the Windows boot files.

The usual repairs didn't work, so I started using Mint full time while I was looking for solutions that didn't just want me to reinstall. I realised after the first few days that I wasn't missing much from Windows, and it was just the Windows only software like Photoshop that was holding me back. I'm looking into switching the last few things over now so that I can go to Mint full time 👍

I used it full time at work but what kept me from using it full time at home was, of course, games. Once the Stream Deck took off I switched, no dual-boot. Only way Windows shows up on my screens is via virt-viewer or remmina now.

Pop just worked out of the box for me, which is a huge consideration.

I couldn’t get mint to display on more than 1 display and driver installation was a nightmare. So much so that I had to go recreate a windows usb to get back to having display out.

In my case it's mostly that it works perfectly on laptops without any excessive power consumption or weird sleep-when-closed-lid problems. I still can't get my fingerprint reader to work, but I can live with that. And it's loaded with QoL stuff like the window tiling shortcut. But mainly, I just don't have to fight with it, from installation to everyday use.

Speaking personally, it's consistently done a great job of supporting the hardware on the laptops on which I've installed it without requiring any special effort on my part. (Ironically this wasn't true for their own Oryx Pro laptop, but that was more because the laptop itself was barely functional and not because there was anything wrong with PopOS itself.)

I also really like its "Refresh Install" feature which reinstalls the operating system while keeping all of your non-system files in place, which I've used in a couple of unfortunate cases to go from a borked unbootable machine to a working machine in under 30 minutes. I mainly use this laptop for gaming so because Steam installs everything in my home directory my downloaded game library was fully preserved by this process.

When I used it, it was the ability to switch window tiling on and off on the fly, and for each of those tiles to have tabs. I’ve switched to another distro but I keep using GNOME because of that specific shell extension.

I had sort of the reverse situation. For years I was 100% linux only for work but "stuck" in windows because I likes gamez. Round about the time the steamdeck came out, I swapped to linux/popos full time and it was like coming home from a bad business trip.

Endeavour was my second-favourite during my last test drive of various distros but I had some reservations about using an Arch-based distro for my work machine compared to the generally more stable Debian/Ubuntu. I'm also not sure I can live without the PopOS window tiling feature.