Most Wayland compositors don not have the concept of multiple windows being one application. And you cannot always control how and where they appear.
This is not a Wayland complaint. Just pointing out that old GIMP was just not very compatible with the core Design of Wayland.
Depending on what compositor you use, a lot of this has really improved.
The biggest “Linux” skill would be package management. It is one of the biggest differences.
Most of the rest of the advice here stems from desktop environment choice.
It depends on the distro and how it feels about shipping non-free software. Fedora, as an example, still ships without them.
Good thing GIMP went single window before Wayland popularity spiked.
Pretty harsh response given that a proper shape tool, and specifically the ability to draw a circle, is on the GIMP roadmap.
I do not think it is the most essential functionality but even the project sees it as missing.
Text has gotten a lot better in recent versions. It could still be better.
It is just a computer. Don’t let us nerds intimidate you. Use what you are comfortable with.
That said, you could dual boot or even just boot of a USB stick into a live Linux session. That will let you play with it and decide if it is as scary as you feared.
Linux Mint can be written to USB and booted into a live Linux session I believe.
Believe it not, Steam even works on RHEL if you use Flatpak.
But you are probably going to want to go for something a bit more current. Fedora or Bazzite may work for you as they use the same core layout and userland as RHEL. Fedora is the test bed for the ideas that go into CentOS that becomes RHEL.
Resize your partition to free up some space for a new partition. You will have to shrink the filesystem and then the partition. Install Linux on the new partition. Once installed, you can mount the old drive and set it up to mount as /home
Then clean things up a bit.
Assuming you used LUKS, you will have to know your passphrase to mount the encrypted drive.
Once you have a /home separate from your boot partition, it is a lot easier to distro-hop.
Resizing is a bit risky though. If you can afford even a small SSD, installing to that and then mounting /home is safer.
Put Linux on one of those spare hard drives and simply mount the existing drive as a second drive in Linux.
This will give you access to all your current files from within Linux without having to do anything. Move over what you want and need as you use Linux. At some point, you will probably want to reformat the original Windows drive for extra space. You could consider mounting it as /home at that point.
Choosing a distro is a matter of taste. I can tell you though that I have moved a few Windows users to Linux Mint and they are all happy with it. My last one was LMDE (Mint with a Debian base).
Most distros do not require the extra repos. For Debian though, you do. The ones shipped with the distro, even Debian 13, are too old and have problems.
KDE has vastly improved in my view and is a really great option these days. That said…
It is huge, monolithic, and difficult to modularize.
It is complex.
It occasionally has runaway resource use (eg. Indexing).
Speaking for myself, this is why COSMIC is appealing:
I also love that it is driving Smithay and Iced which matures the foundations of other great projects like Niri and even RedoxOS.
For System76, the choice is to keep shipping their now very long in the tooth previous version or a beta of their new one. I have no doubt the beta is the better experience.
And they are obviously stabilizing the beta rapidly now.
Two pretty massive facts for anybody trying to answer this question:
Since driver version 555, explicit sync has been supported. This makes a massive difference to the experience on Wayland. Most of the problems people report are for drivers earlier than this (eg. black screens and flicker).
Since driver version 580, NVIDIA uses Open Source modules to interact with the kernel. These are not Open Source drivers. They are the proprietary drivers from NVIDIA that should now “just work” across kernel upgrades (like AMD has forever). This solves perhaps the biggest hassle of dealing with NVIDIA on Linux.
Whether you get to enjoy these significant improvements depends on how long it takes stuff to make it to your distribution. If you are on Arch, you have this stuff today. If you are on Debian, you are still waiting (even on Debian 13).
This is not an endorsement of either distro. They are simply examples of the two extremes regarding how current the software versions are in those distros. Most other distros fall somewhere in the middle.
All this stuff will make it to all Linux users eventually. They are solved problems. Just not solved for everyone.
For anybody tying to make sense of who has trouble on NVIDIA, keep in mind that Debian uses ancient drivers.
Thankfully Debian Stable updated recently so it has gotten a lot better but, the last I checked, the Debian drivers still did not support explicit sync. This could lead to problems on Wayland.
Remember that “stable” in Debian means that your system will not change much. That is often a good thing but it can often mean progress comes to Debian much later than other distros.
Never use Debian as a benchmark for what works on Linux.
MIT and Apache are free software licenses. They provide all of the “4 freedoms” defined by the Free Software Foundation.
But x11 is insecure
ducks
UUtils has, until now, been a niche project with few users. Putting it in the most popular desktop distro is going to expose it to many new users and use cases. Some of those are bound to find differences in behaviour between UUtils and GNU which should be considered bugs. No doubt.
But this “not-very-well tested” mantra is just silly. UUtils itself uses the exact same test suite as GNU does. They have been testing against this suite for years:
https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking/blob/main/gnu-results.svg
While not all tests pass yet, the subset of functionality that people are likely to actually use is very well tested.
And the reason some bugs were found recently is precisely because UUtils were put through the normal test cycle for Ubuntu. A small number of bugs were caught which is the goal of that process. These are things that were previously not in the test suite. I see there are some new tests. UUtils may have contributed to that as new use cases were encountered that showed differences in behaviour between GNU and UUtils. The issues discovered were quickly fixed.
Think of what is involved in creating a distribution like Ubuntu and building the tens of thousands of packages that they ship in their repos—all with build scripts written for GNU Coreutils. This is all working with UUtils unmodified.
With the distro live now, the number of users will have already exploded. Where are the bug reports and articles about all the problems encountered? Crickets.
That does not mean there will not be any such cases. That is not my point at all. My point is that “not very well tested” does not jive with how well things are going considering what a massive change this is.
UUtils is much better tested than much of the software I use.
The FSF approach the microcode is just brain dead.