Yeah, I'm just another one of those who has recently switched to Linux. And, as many, what I did was to go for a distro catered for beginners. I chose Ubuntu at first because I had briefly used it like eleven years ago at high school as part of computer class, and actually liked it back then, and, all in all, I do like Ubuntu's current GNOME adaption.
However, I decided after a few days to move on to a community-based distro as it aligns more with my way of thinking (as well as for a couple of issues which were Ubuntu/GNOME related), and the obvious choice, having tried Ubuntu, was Mint. And I do like Mint, even more than Ubuntu; I especially like Mint's adaption of the Xfce DE and I would definitely use it if I had a low-powered computer.
What didn't quite convince me, though, was the limited DE selection available. While learning about all the Linux stuff I came to know about desktops, and I felt like, if I wanted to ever use a different one, yes, it could be installed the hard way, but I would rather have a distro that can be installed with my desired desktop by default, and the one that got my attention was KDE.
And that's how I've ended up on Debian. Yeah, not your usual recommendation for beginners but... I don't see anything bad about it? Like, yeah, I have Nvidia, but I honestly wouldn't mind going through the hassle of installing the GPU's driver through the terminal (and I haven't even bothered yet cause I don't really game much anymore). But, apart from that, I'm delighted with what I see. I could've gone with Fedora, which was my next choice, but I actually like Debian's slow update cycle, as I don't want to be bothered often with setting up my system again. I want something as close as "set it and forget it" as possible. Plus, it is also the one I have felt the most at ease with thanks to KDE indeed.
So that's my story! It's been an intense few days of learning, installing, deleting, and reinstalling OSes on my system, but I now feel at ease and will be installing my favourite programmes or searching alternatives for the ones I used on Windows.
Thank you for reading and have a nice evening!
I've been there too!
Updating to a new version is such a chore: you have to follow the news, then wonder how long to wait before updating, then you have to set aside at least a few hours for the actual update (well, for fixing what may go wrong - not that stuff actually goes wrong, but you still set aside some time just in case).
The solution to this is in the exact opposite direction you'd imagine.
For a few years (since last time I got a new PC), I've been running a rolling distro (tumbleweed *) and... it's been great: no big updates, just incremental ones.
If anything breaks (and it never happened to me: there has been times where errors prevented the system to update, but never has it broken on me), you just boot the snapshot before the last update and try again in a few hours/days.
That's nixos :) It takes a long time to "set" (and you never really finish doing it) but you can switch to a new PC at any time and have your exact system on it (bar what the few things you have to change to account for the different hardware, of course).
* I hear that with arch&co you actually have to follow the release notes as sometimes there are manual tasks to do - it's not so in tumbleweed (at least, as much as i know and as far as me experience goes) - IDK about other rolling distros (or debian testing/sid)
A while ago I tried out cachyos since it was the big new thing. I can’t remember what the update was, but I recall Pac-Man threw up a warning to say “Manual intervention required etc etc etc” rather than updating.
I might be remembering it wrong.