I’ve been using Ubuntu for a while now, and was planning for my new build (Within the next week or two) to try out PopOS (Which is still based off of Ubuntu).

If I was more familiar with Fedora, I might have tried out Nobara, (but it doesn’t have the support that PopOS does yet).

And considering you use Nvidia, I’ve read that PopOS makes it easier to get drivers for that. If you’re still new, either PopOS or base Ubuntu would work, but PopOS might get you set up faster. I wish I could give a more detailed answer.

I have a lot of PCs for different purposes, so this answer could probably be considered cheating. It really depends on what I am doing. I’ll go in order of Highest usage to Least usage, and separate professional usage and personal usage.

Personal

• Future gaming PC: PopOS
  • Maybe breaking my own ordering rules a little bit, but this will see the most use when I’m done.
  • I am currently in the process of building this.
  • I am finally going to try to not use windows for gaming, it’s possible it could be futile, but Valve’s work on Wine/Proton has made amazing strides.
• Previous gaming PC: Dual boot Ubuntu 22.04/Windows 10
  • This is likely to become almost primarily an Ubuntu machine soon.
  • Not compatible with windows 11, the windows part is around only to preserve files at this point
    • Once I copy everything I want and need, I will see if I can move my filesystems around, this will probably be a huge pain.
• “Gaming” Laptop: Windows 10
  • This is merely my most powerful laptop, it would never outperform my future gaming PC, but it’s certainly a lot more convenient.
  • I’m considering switching over to some flavor of linux at some point, but I’m not ready to do that yet. (Plus I have to see what works with this laptop)
  • It is compatible with Windows 11, but I’m not sure if I want to do that. (I may do it just to get the free license, if I need to)
• Media laptop: Windows 10
  • Originally a “gaming” laptop, it can’t keep up nowadays.
  • I converted it into a streaming platform for my console games
  • Not compatible with windows 11, so when it goes out of support I will need to find an alternative.
    • This will be tricky, the last time I tried to install Ubuntu on it, I got kernel panics during the install process. I’m sure there’s something I’m missing to make it work, but I don’t have the time/patience/urgency right now.
• College Laptop: Ubuntu 22.04
  • I used this primarily for college when I was continuing my education.
    • It made connecting to the University’s Linux servers a lot easier.
  • Has a development environment set up on it.
  • The least powerful “general purpose” computer I have
  • I’m not sure what to do with this computer now.
• “Pi Hole” Raspberry Pi: Raspbian
  • Used as my personal DNS server.
  • Kind of single purpose at the moment.
  • I’m not sure if I should use it for anything else?

Professional

I’m not going to list every computer here, so I’ll just categorize them by purpose.

• Development: Windows 10
  • I’m a .NET Developer
  • Visual Studio Enterprise requires Windows 10+
• Server: Windows Server
  • For deploying web applications
• CI/CD : Various Linux OSes
  • Used for version control servers and CI/CD Pipelines

I personally find Operating Systems to be situational. I wouldn’t say one is really better than the other. However, I’ve been moving away from Windows for personal use lately, as I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with the overall user experience. I know that custom shells for Windows exist, but I don’t know how good of an idea it is to use them.

I am trying it out just to understand it’s nuances. I think the concept is solid, but I feel like the federated part could use a little more work so it’s more possible to use whatever lemmy instance you prefer. Signing up on any particular instance is fine (Though I wish it had more options), but if I cannot get onto an instance that I prefer, it’s tricky to curate my experience.

That being said, I think it is a fixable problem, and I have ideas to fix that based upon other websites I’ve used, but I have no idea where to submit them.