Rolling release: openSUSE Tumbleweed Semi-annual release: Fedora KDE Spin LTS: Kubuntu (3 years), Debian (5 years), AlmaLinux (10 years)
I personally think semi-annual is where it’s at. You get packages that are mostly up-to-date (and with Flatpak user-facing software is up-to-date anyway), and you don’t have to fear that something will break/be incompatible with every small update.
I don’t even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it’s probably not great that there are three competing formats for “applications with dependencies included”. It was supposed to be “package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use”, now it’s a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.
I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.
By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.
Not sure how Bottles and not buying games directly relate (other than Bottles also being able to play pirated games obviously), but anyway.
I switched to Linux on my main computer as a “New Year’s Resolution” and so far I’m not missing much. I did cross-grade from an RTX 3080 to a Radeon 7800 XT because 95 % of the problems I experienced were related to Nvidia and their crappy drivers, but after that I had little issues in general.
I also use Fedora + KDE. KDE on Wayland seems to be the most reliable way to get VRR (FreeSync) working with multiple monitors. I installed it onto a new SSD I bought for this purpose, but I’ll transition more and more SSDs over to the Linux install as time progresses. The only reason I booted into Windows again so far was to check out some application’s configuration so I could replicate it on Fedora’s side. I didn’t even bother to install the Radeon GPU driver under Windows.
I could complain about smaller issues, but these are mostly related to third party software where the Linux version has some weird quirks (or where there’s straight up no Linux version, mainly games).
Overall very solid and I assume it only gets better with time.
If you find that macOS and the software for it lead to good productivity, I’d advise against ditching it solely for having to allow unsigned applications to run. It’s a few clicks once per app.
I didn’t use Asahi myself. I’d imagine it works for quite a few people, but I personally wouldn’t use it as a daily driver, because the community support is much smaller compared to popular distributions. I’d get a non-Apple computer for using Linux. You could just try it out though, obviously.
“Working well” is relative. You can make Nvidia work, but there are some caveats. Currently, there’s driver 535 and 545, and both have different quirks. Neither works particularly well with Wayland, certain applications can flicker when they need longer to draw than the display’s refresh rate.
So, when I tried with the 3080, I eventually gave up and used X11. X11 has a technical limitation though, and it prevents VRR to work with multiple displays. That’s because X11 combines all displays to a single virtual “screen”, so a full screen application on one display can’t set the refresh rate of that display independently. This isn’t a problem with single monitor setups though.
As I tested Baldur’s Gate 3, I found that choosing Vulkan in the launcher resulted in about half the performance compared to Windows, and DirectX 11 (which ironically gets translated to Vulkan by DXVK) had graphical glitches like black boxes instead of houses etc.
Knowing all that and if you’re willing to experiment with driver versions, it’s not that horrible, it’s just not as straightforward as AMD Radeon on Linux (or Nvidia on Windows for that matter).