EndeavourOS is pretty good at making using Arch a bit easier in an opinionated way.

Fedora’s usually do a good job making the keyboard thing consistent. If you’re gaming and want something that you don’t need to adjust all the time check out Bazzite.

In any case give KDE Plasma desktop a shot especially if you’re used to how Windows works. I mean a more vanilla version that what Garuda probably came with.

The people saying tiling managers are the shit are the ones who have been Linuxing for quite some time. I think newcomers should just always go for a major, mature, opinionated desktop first. KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. Mate or Xfce if you really like some old school aesthetic or have no RAM to speak of (<4GB). Distro choice comes after, I don’t recommend base Ubuntu for most people because of the risk of enshittification from Canonical that I see on the horizon.

Mediating, as in managing interactions between people who refuse to understand each other (or you for that matter). Being able to talk your way around, de-escalate, and just in general “make everyone happy enough” is going to both be super AI-proof but also make the journeys of you and those close to you much safer on this planet.

I believe it is a skill that can be learned. It’s not really taught anywhere directly though.

If you’re more technically inclined, whatever practical skills you need to live without money. Food, shelter, water, and energy related. If you can confidently and cheaply fix whatever necessity there’s broken in a house, you’ll be valued.

Don’t learn skills that require complex equipment that you don’t own and control yourself, because that equipment can be taken away from you at any time. Eg: most forms of AI usage

I’m in a lot of the same landscape as you, currently running a mac but ubuntu/fedora with gnome is looking at me from behind the corner. What’s blocking me at this time is client IT policies, in order to access stuff in their network it has to be their device and they don’t ship linux so. Next year it is.

Cool! Saving for later.

Yeah, I would feel bad keeping all of the money from that, too.

I mean, there are quite a few others than Arch+family that package a very recent kernel too. Fedora as you mentioned, but also NixOS, openSUSE Tumbleweed and even Gentoo if you’re that kind of a person. I bet I missed some.

But yeah Ubuntu is not necessarily one of them

Get base Debian, you’ll have more options for desktop environment. Once you get past the installation hassle it should just work for the rest of times. MX has its place but it’s specifically made to have no systemd which may not be something a new user is looking for. It feels very opinionated, is what I’m trying to say. May be your thing of course, but I’d recommend reading more on its philosophy before picking.

8 years is probably not old enough to require lighter desktops if the machines were at least mid range at the time. You should be able to use gnome or KDE as you please. Nothing against XFCE in principle, but it can be a little clunky especially for a laptop. No touch gestures, for example.

Wanna share more details? Sounds like something I should actually put on my 32gb

I personally know three, myself included, who are switching right now.