Look long story short, what i expected to be a short install ended up being a 5 hour manhunt for an issue that resulted in needing a closed source instead of open source nvidia driver. Shes all switched to linux, and if her trial goes well and i don't end up tearing my hair out doing tech support. I may switch over as well, probably a different distro though.
One thing i will say though, even though the state of gaming has drastically improved since my first foray into linux, the "fine details" of gaming have not. Fuck me the first time i looked into the modding scene on linux and how much busywork that took, that just killed a little bit of my soul. Even trying to get her game open, we first had a xbox game controller bluetooth not connecting issue, my bandaid was to do a wired connection, and sitting here just now i hear a laugh and look back and see this in her game. What i can only imagine is some sort of video player error, but the game works. Its rough, but it works.
It'll be interesting to see how this goes, thats for sure
I plan on making a post of my own personal experiences in the coming weeks. However, I will issue caution to others who may believe themselves to be higher on the tech savvy ladder: forget most of what you do with Windows and accept that Linux, no matter the distro or DE, is not going to be 100% like your previous Windows experiences. Tech peeps typically have a high level of OS/system customization. These don't usually translate well to a non-Windows OS. On other "managed" operating systems, you might try things, but not be able to really do damage. If you try to force it with Linux, you will fuck yourself.
I'm really concerned about my MiL and wife as they both have machines with NVidia cards. My wife and her mother play Sims 3, as well. Her mom's game, specifically, is extremely mod-heavy and she is religious about updating her mods when patches drop (she's retired so has a shit ton of time to do that monthly, I guess). I've talked to her about getting off Windows, but I'm nervous to get her on any version of Linux because 1) I don't play Sims 3 nor do mods for it, 2) I'm a tech-baby with Linux troubleshooting, unlike Windows, and 3) I'm just a registry editor 💔, so I'm concerned I won't be able to support her potential sticking points with it and Sims 3 and it'll further entrench her against Windows and change, in general.
Good luck on your journey, regardless. The people in this community are pretty great (including the Arch and Vi users, I guess)! Totally wasn't held at gun point while saying that last bit. Nope, not at all!
This, right here, if you're a tech savvy windows user considering migrating, read the above until you've internalized it. Don't trust me? Go watch Linus from LTT use Linux and break everything in a matter of hours because he literally answered "Yes, I know what I'm doing" when he had no idea.
It's my experience that tech savvy windows users know enough to be a danger to themselves, and worse, have the confidence to shoot themselves in the foot.
Yeah, i have an example of this. I spent since time today building a local copy of handbrake have it run in a distrobox of arch to get AMD hardware acceleration as an option. The flatpak version refused to do this. It wasn't too bad, but still wild i did this.