Depends on what your usecase is.
My brother wants to play demanding AAA games on a big screen. He doesn’t see the point of a Steam Deck and is about to sell his.
I play indie games and emulated retro games. The Steam Deck is perfect for me to play. I can sit with my kids when they play in the back yard. The hardware isn’t going to go out of date for me for a very long time.
The Ubuntu story is exactly what happened to me.
OpenSUSE Table weed is what got Linux to stick for me though. Once I learnt enough with that to get started and my OS needed a reinstall, I ended up going with CachyOS too eventually.
Look at the desktop environment first. KDE is like Windows. GNOME is like MacOS.
Then look at some videos about how to get your GPU working on a distro you’re interested in if you have an Nvidia card. AMD GPU works out of the box.
I would recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Excellent implementation of KDE, GUI tools to do advanced things, rolling release (i.e. constantly up to date) but also thoroughly tested. Rolls back easily if something gets messed up. This gave me the least problems starting and I stuck with it for over a year. It was great.
Noob opinion: they’re all the same, you’re just choosing from the minor differences in the quirks one has over another and it would be easy enough to work around those if you were motivated to.
The real difference is the DE, how quickly updates are pushed, good GUI on a package manager and if it is immutable or not.
For noobs like me it also helps if it has a lot of users so I can find forum posts about my specific problem. Vetrans keep saying that online documentation is enough, but I wouldn’t even know where to start with applying generic instructions to my installation (e.g. how is a wiki going to be able to tell me that my low framerates in Street Fighter 6 are because of split lock protections on my CPU). How would I diagnose the problem to know where to look? This is the major appeal of Debian based systems.
You’re not screwed. Depends on how much you enjoy tinkering and troubleshooting.
My main advice would be to keep your data backed up and completely disconnected from the PC. And make sure your machine is not critical (i.e. for working from home or something). Other than that you do what you want. If you want to dive deep in Arch then that’s fine.
One thing to know is that the important part relevant to you is: the desktop environment (KDE) and the Linux distro (Arch) are different things. The far more important thing for you is to have KDE… the distro underneath just needs to not get in the way.
If you’ve got Arch up and running then stick with it until it gives you trouble. I naturally ended up distro hopping in the beginning because I would catastrophically break something I couldn’t repair and could change distros naturally when reinstalling.
Good options for easy distros with KDE would be:
Tuxedo OS (or Kubuntu) - easiest and there’s lots of support online.
Fredora - rock solid and highly recommend. Although I would recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed instead, this got me hooked on Linux and was the least problematic for a bleeding edge updated distro, where I happily used Discover for installing and updating.
CachyOS - good option for sticking with Arch.
Alexandrite is easily the best.
For people like me who don’t know about the web frontends: use your desktop browser and go to: https://alexandrite.app/lemmy-instance-address
No one is saying Windows has no problems.
Tough to swallow pills for the Linux community: Linux is not for normies.
I agree with you completely. I’ll advocate for Linux everyday. My Steam Deck converted me. My gaming PC is great with CachyOS. I’ve just finished setting up my Debian server. I’m really getting into this.
But the truth is that this shit is not for normies. And now there are going to be a torrent of replies saying “but it worked fine for me, so your experience is invalid”.
Welcome to Linux. Glad to see you’re not letting the hurdles get in your way and are working through solutions. There’s more to come.
You say “5 year old laptop” as if that’s ancient… 10th gen Intel 😄. I don’t even look at laptops newer than 5 years. Don’t need much more for internet tasks and office work.
Things for you to decide:
Which desktop environment do you want (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, cosmic, etc)
Do you want it to be super up to date all the time? Or are you OK with slower updates for a more stable system?
Difficulty: How hard do you want things to be? Do you want things to be set up and lots of solutions online? Or are you willing to dive deep, do stuff yourself and figure stuff out?
I started with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and loved it. Highly recommended. I didn’t know about TuxedoOS at the time and that seems like a good place to start too. Noe I know more and am on CachyOS and am super happy with it.