Here’s my 2 cents on my linux experience. Arch is very good because it is always up to date, so it avoids a lot of pitfalls that make other distros like debian and fedora sometimes more brittle than arch. I personally haven’t had much trouble with arch in the last 4 years, but the main arch problem is that compatibility is never 100% complete and (more relistically) out-of-the-box. I’m a big fan of complex and choice-friendly systems such as arch and gentoo but my pick for a work-related or gaming system is currently bazzite. Luck you, it has official framework support. Its based on fedora immutable, has both KDE and gnome versions, boasts great steam support (haven’t had any issues running games with 0 tweaks required as they are all already applied out of the box) , tailscale and wine support are also great. It has sane defaults (btrfs filesystem, possibility to encrypt drive, swap by default, wayland, flatpak-first) and just works for everything. If you’re unsatified with arch, I would suggest you to try it out, I’ve been a huge distro hopper for many many years before bazzite settled me. Whenever there’s something that breaks, rollout the last snapshots that it keeps by default, knowing that it won’t affect your user data or apps that are on another partition and enjoy a working system again.
For your needs:
- Windows app compatibility with wine is excellent, performance is as good as it get
- Same for steam and games
- Reliable for work purposes
Concerning your DE, KDE 6 is a mess. If you’ve only used this, try KDE 5, laugh a bit at how KDE 6 really made kde unsuable (was a huge KDE fan and because of the bugs it pushed me back to GNOME which I hate but I gotta have soemthing that works), and switch to GNOME or KDE 5 while they fix the new version. KDE 4 all again I swear… anyways. Hyperland should be great because there’s very few bugs in there as it’s relatively simple compared to KDE and GNOME and other massive DEs, but its not easy to use or configure and takes a whole lot of time. Maybe COSMIC will save us all from going back to GNOME when KDE breaks everything again in version 7… Just know it’s not your fault that your DE broke (if you did install all packets related to the DE, which in itself is pretty hard).
Linux windows (wayland / x) and sound (pipewire / alsa / pulseaudio) system is a mess and always has been, it’s a shame but it’s free at least. I understand if you’re a pro audio user you might not find what you need on linux. If you can try to use something open source so you have the option to use it on any system you want in the future but I know some software is just fundamentally broken in wine due to linux’s limitations, I experienced that first hand.
Arc browser seems like a closed-source, AI-infused mess that I would rather stay away from but who am I to tell you what to use. It’s true that on linux (and almost everywhere for that matter) the browser market is also depressing. Firefox is corrupt to its core with CEO pay going up and 400M$ deals with Google and is currently undergoing a hostile takeover by the board of directors, acquiring ad companies and putting tracking toggles on by default (Shared post - Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla, Shared post - Mozilla 2023 Annual Report: CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives, Shared post - Mozilla Firefox Goes Anti-Privacy, Pro-Advertising, and most importantly this for the hostile takeover by the board of directors Shared post - Mozilla Sued for Discrimination by Former CEO-To-Be), webkit is a fork of a fork of a fork, Chromium is riddled with google tracking tech and bad choices code-wise and let’s not even talk about Chrome… But this time we have hope with the recent announcement of a truly independent browser (not based on chromium, webkit nor gecko!!!), ladybird. However it’s not usable or even a pre-alpha for now, it is currently worked on and will be able to end this mess in the future.
So arc browser it is? Well bazzite can run it two ways: first one is obsivously wine, second one is through brew! Bazzite includes brew supports by default. See this page to install it: arc — Homebrew Formulae
Anyways, it seems to me that you’ll enjoy much more another distro, not that arch is not for beginners (it’s an incredible learning experience about linux and for not work-related purposes). I would deeply regret seeing you going back to windows however, so don’t hesitate to see if ubuntu, pop OS (maybe try the new cosmic alpha and stick to it until it becomes the 1.0?), or any other linux distro fits for you. And if you must, well you maybe can dual boot and stick to linux for its awesomeness and its principles. Because, in the end, linux is getting by the day while Windows is only getting worse, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.