If you're explicitly using WINE to open games in 2026, then you're doing it wrong. Launch the games through Steam and enable Proton in the compatibility settings.

That, or get a more lightweight launcher like Faugus, and select Proton (GE or Cachy flavors might work slightly better for some games)

Games should work in Steam with "Steam Play for all titles" enabled. What are the apps?

Yeah, other than photoshop/outlook, the day to day is fine for just about everyone.

The days of a kernel update screwing over a video driver aren't quite gone yet. When things go sideways, they are much harder to fix for the average person, and the people with the necessary skill sets are still a bit scarce. Not every family has a cousin Jimmy capable of reading dmesg and screwing with kernel modules.

That said, most of the big ai's are totally capable of walking a non-techie through fixing a pretty screwed up linux box.

What drivers are you missing?

The GPU is actually NVIDIA! But planning an upgrade to an AMD card soon.

It's wild. "I don't want to have to tinker," then go on to talk about the 10 different debloating softwares they need to run every time it updates.

never have to tinker more in my life than on windows. its even worse with the batshit things Claude will do. On Linux shit just works

Absolutely this. I was spending 2-3 hours a week making my Win11 box stable.

Once a month I had to redo all the sound drivers, as with each reboot sound would get quieter and quieter until I was running a lottery of which program wouldn't be affected any given day and suddenly have it's volume loud enough to shake the house.

I upgraded CPU/MB after the MB failed, MS cancelled my Win11 licence. I realized I still was spending stupid amounts of time keeping things working, and I am very against all the AI being shoved into every Windows book and cranny.

The first week of ditching Win11, I was tinkering everything because New Shiny, but now things were working I'm not even sure I've spent 3 hours in the last two months tinkering.

"Windows doesn't require any tinkering, just run this to make a local account, decline 100 requests to use OneDrive and Office 365, get these debloaters, uninstall all these things, and make sure you always tell Windows to not restart your computer while you're using it every time it updates. And when it does update, you'll need to run the debloaters again."

I've also had a great experience with Nobara. I did try Bazzite, but the immutable nature of it stopped me from doing the things I'm used on Linux. However, I've got my partner on Nobara as well, and she's verrry much not techy and still having a great experience.

That was exactly my experience with that same distro + flavor. One of my happiest moments of the past year has been buying a new prebuilt gaming PC with Windows preinstalled and immediately wiping Windows in favor of Bazzite.

(Because I know someone will wonder: I bought prebuilt because, for a brief time, a store near me still had pre-RAMpocalypse prebuilts for their original price. They had already increased the build-to-order and individual part price to account for higher RAM cost, so for that brief time I was able to get a reasonably-priced, decently-spec'd prebuilt gaming PC for cheaper than building my own. It had Windows preinstalled, and having them remove it for me would've saved me like $10 on the license, but made the machine into a build-to-order, which would've ballooned the RAM price by like $300. Plus, holding Windows' head under the water until the bubbles stopped was unexpectedly awesome.)