Yeah, I completely understand. I bounced off Linux desktop several times and I'm a sysadmin.

It's only the last few years where there have been rapid and significant improvements to get gaming so it "just works*" and both of the popular desktop environments, KDE (Windows-like) and gnome (Mac-like) have had a heavy focus on fixing all of the little fiddly annoyances that turned people off.

It's not perfect and it can be annoying, but its dramatically better than it was 5 years ago while Windows keeps moving in the opposite direction.

I'm not trying to sell you on it really, Linus doesn't pay me commissions. Windows isn't THAT bad and learning a new OS is a big ask.

I've just been impressed by the state of things and enjoy yapping about it.

laziness about having to go through and reinstall everything on a clean install

Package managers make this a breeze to the point that people upload their personal script to github so they can run one command to get all of their software and theming on a new PC lol.

No need to even go that far, just pop open the app "store" (everything is free lol) and just click away at everything you want. Can probably get most of your stuff in 10 minutes tops.

What even are the significant differences with different distros?

It boils down to how effective the user experience & preference is and what the backend is built on (which usually affects user experience & preference lol).

Mint is highly recommended because it cleans up a ton of the random stuff from Ubuntu upstream and maintains a clean and low cost (cpu/ram usage) desktop environment that's very easy to use. It's highly recommended for anyone who is new or inexperienced with linux or OSs in general and just wants to get on with life. The single downside is that its packages are not the latest and greatest, so its great for everything except gaming where you want the new stuff like drivers, proton upgrades, new features, etc.

Fedora is what Ubuntu was 15 years ago, which is best all around user experience. It chooses very sensible but cutting edge packages which gives you excellent performance benefits of new tech like BTRFS/XFS without losing out on stability. It's also the distro Linus himself uses because he finds it easy to just install and again, get on with life lol. Fedora also has excellent user docs and forums which is great if you need help with something. Only downside is I think you have to flick a switch (or run a command) to enable all video codecs because they don't ship it on their main package repository since H264 & HEVC have weird licensing issues.

Bazzite is a downstream of Fedora Silverblue, which is an atomic distro that makes it really hard to screw something up by using a read only root and rollback-able updates, similar to Android and SteamOS. It was specifically designed to make gaming on handhelds an easy out of box experience so you don't have to manually set up stuff like touchscreen keyboards or power settings on non PC hardware. You can run it on PC if you'd like the benefit of the rollback image system which can unbork your machine super easy, though it already is quite hard to bork because the root filesystem is read only, so apps are installed in a similar way as Android apps (Flatpak).

Learning Linux is actually quite intuitive (thankfully), and everything from the GUI perspective is mostly the same, if not an outright improvement in several areas. I would highly recommend playing with the live install of whichever distro you pick along with the desktop environment to get a feel for how it looks before you commit to an install.

Desktop Environments are also not tied to distros. You can basically choose any DE on any distro (like Mint's Cinnamon on Fedora), but the two biggest ones are GNOME (Mac like) and KDE (Windows like). I think KDE is way better than GNOME, but you can play with both & more to see which one you prefer.

Your main issue to figure out when permanently switching is if there is any software or process that you rely on in Windows that would be different in Linux. For me it was switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice (there are also more, like OnlyOffice), which was completely painless since it was like 95% the same and could open up docx just fine.

The other possible ones could be:

• Adobe stuff (some stuff like PS works, but it's a bit involved to setup the first time)
• Games that use kernel level anticheat (big nono in linux because it breaks security)

The second one is really what's keeping a lot of people from making a permanent change which I'm hoping Valve can change with the upcoming Steam Machine because even for Windows, its like running a rootkit that really should not have that level of access to your PC.

I don't play any games that utilize it, but you might and it won't work on linux until the publisher decides to let it: https://areweanticheatyet.com/. The comments are usually outdated back from when the game first released, so as long is it's green or blue, it should run out of box.

Some publishers (Epic Games mostly) are also just dicks that don't use kernel level in some games but still choose not to enable linux support when compiling their game, despite all the major anitcheat vendors supporting linux and even mac.

The good news is that for everything else, there's a pretty good chance you'll actually see an increase in performance from Windows. The biggest one for me was World of Warships which went from 2 minutes load times down to just 30 seconds on a hard drive, and about 15-20%+ FPS even when on an SSD.

Yeah, I get that. But you'll have to do that anyway and when the time comes, getting Linux will be there for you.
Regarding distros, it really doesn't matter at the beginning, hoping from distro to distro if you need it later is dead easy, most of the time it's as easy as running one command to install all the apps, and copying your /home/ dir, it will transfer wast majority of all your settings, if not all. Some apps are stubborn but those are outliers.
So the choice of a distro basically comes to a single thing you care about. Like, for example, some are "rolling release", which means they try to have all the libs and apps and other shit up to date, some are "stable", which means they don't update that often. Both have their ups and downs, personally I find rolling releases easier to deal with.
The biggest difference for a novice is what desktop environment is the default one, and that's basically a matter of preference (but actually KDE is the best of them, and that's my objective opinion).

LMDE = Linux Mint Debian Edition.

That's LMDE, except LMDE uses Debian for upstream instead of Ubuntu. It's the same developers though.

I'll legit look into this tomorrow. e: Done - https://lemmy.world/post/46306690/23526313

The answer is generally: Proton/Steam. There was a patch to WINE or Proton recently that made it much easier to use mods that require custom DLLs.

The core weird trick is understanding that there's a directory for your game (once installed/setup in Proton) that's essentially the C: drive. As far as your game is concerned, it's running on Windows where it is the only non-system software installed.

So, any mods that are just scripts/plugins where you copy them into a folder then launch the game (anything without DLL, basically), you install the same way... But you use the directory, that contains the "C drive" for that specific game.

It sound complicated but once you do it once or twice it'll feel familiar. You just now have a unique "C drive" directory for each game.

You can install/run multiple applications in the same bottle (basically what WINE calls the fake-c-drive-using windows environment). For example, when I play PoE2, I use a third party program to make trading easier. I just run that program inside the same bottle as the game and they think they're both running on the same computer.

For basic things like installing and playing games on Steam it's all handled automatically. You click the install button and then click the play button. Installing workshop mods is also exactly like in Windows. Steam just knows how to use WINE/Proton.

Ok, my coffee fueled morning research:

Essentially, if you can install the game with Steam it works out of the box. According to Protondb (https://www.protondb.com/app/244210) the game has a Gold rating which means it works without any major flaws.

• There's a guide to get Assetto Corsa setup: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2828364666

• If you don't want to fuss with all of this manually, someone has created a script to do most of the work here: https://github.com/sihawido/assettocorsa-linux-setup

• As far as mods, I'd need to know which other mods you use to see if there are any specific instructions/issues.

• List of force feedback steering wheels, the driver needed to use them and a rating of how well they work with Linux. It looks like all Moza products have a Platinum rating so they work flawlessly. https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels

• Moza Pit House doesn't work, but someone has created a flatpak native Linux version: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.lawstorant.boxflat

• Here's a compilation of links for software to get various pieces of simracing gear working: https://github.com/LukasLichten/awesome-linux-simracing

• Steam VR via Quest 2 using ALVR: https://pawamoy.github.io/posts/steam-linux-alvr-quest2/