recarsion
I got into it when I started university and we started using Linux for a few programming classes. My dad helped me set up a dual boot as he had been a Linux user for a decade at this point, and I had used it for some time as well but had to switch to Windows for MS Office bullshit for school and games.
At this point it was kind of cool to use a different OS but I honestly wasn’t much impressed, mainly because of the UI which I later learned was Gnome 3 - Ubuntu had just ditched Unity, but of course I didn’t know anything about this yet.
Then I took my first internship where the first thing we did was install Linux on our computers, and the installer they gave us was Ubuntu 16.04 with the Unity desktop - which I LOVED, holy shit it was amazing, so much better than Gnome 3, and miles better than Windows. The first weeks of the internship were basically purely education, among other things an in-depth intro to Linux, command-line tools and such, and I think this was key - not being alone in the process was very important, and I’m not sure if or when I would have made the full switch without this. I started distro hopping in my free time and loved every moment of it.
This was also coincidentally when gaming on Linux really started taking off with Proton etc, so after experimenting with it, I finally ditched Windows completely and made the full switch in I think 2019, about a decade after my first encounter with Linux, and 2 years after I started using it regularly.
I wouldn’t consider myself an evangelist by any means, I won’t bring the topic up unless asked, but I will recommend taking a look and experimenting in a VM to anyone with an ounce of technical know-how. Furthermore, I think every programmer should be using Linux (yes, literally) unless it’s impossible or too painful in their case - which I think is not many cases.
Okay, I ended up typing a novel but fuck it I’m leaving it here because I loved writing this way too much.
Avoid Kaby Lake processors. I specifically have i7-7600u in my laptop and must use a kernel parameter otherwise it kernel panics freezes minutes after booting. Sometimes it still freezes when waking up from sleep or hibernate. Something to do with power management or such.
Because people will never agree on a single one, and it’s FOSS so nothing is forced. I for one am glad I don’t have to use apt because I prefer pacman, just as I am glad someone who doesn’t want to use an Arch-derivative has Debian and apt to fall back on.
You didn’t mention your hardware, but gaming in general benefits from a rolling distro for things like latest drivers, latest wine version etc. (Be aware though that if you have an Nvidia card you’ll have to run the proprietary driver, the open source one performs poorly.)
I understand being wary of Arch-derivatives, but it sounds like you’re the kind of user who would benefit from it and has plenty of experience with Linux, so I can sincerely recommend it. And since this is for a personal computer, nothing bad is really going to happen if it ends up not working out other than the mild annoyance of having to install something else.
But honestly, things don’t break all that often, at least for me. For reference, I’ve been using Endeavour with KDE for a year, and the only real problem I can remember off the top of my head is that Steam was broken for like a week when the new UI rolled out that was somehow incompatible with the current Nvidia driver, but this got fixed with the next update and there was a workaround to make it run with the old UI so it remained usable.
KDE and Cinnamon.