I lay here getting over cold-like symptoms, and was happy to see your post! Yeah, I can see your brain cranking away as I read your thought stream, lol. I feel honored to be told I planted a seed in someoneās mind, and that it is of someone that has a pretty large following on YouTube is really cool!
Like I said, you really donāt have to abandon your favorite OS that starts with a W, but we live in an age where disk space is pretty inexpensive, and you own a laptop that allows for 2 SSDs, why not try that other OS that starts with an L? If you do end up blowing it up, well - half the fun is trying to fix it (gotta see it as a fun project, not a serious OS). And if you really canāt fix it (or simply want to give up), blow it away and reinstall!
When I was playing around with Linux, my second drive wasnāt anything huge to save on $$$. It was whatever disk drive I had laying around (which is usually pretty small - like 256 GB). Today, 256 GB is huge for just a Linux install if all youāre doing is learning or testing boundaries (ex: customizing). PS: I tend not to customize anything - Iāve learned the more you try to be clever, the more likely shit breaks and you donāt know if it was your own fault. This holds true for computer hardware, software, OSes, even cars (VW is like wild for stuff like that - can even change how your brake lights work and add features like folding mirrors just from modifying software).
So even in Windows, and ESPECIALLY Linux, I donāt tend to install shell replacements, rarely do I customize colors even (except for Windows 10 and 11 - the defaults is hard on my eyes and makes it difficult to tell where one window starts or ends when they overlap).
So keep your Windows SSD on itās own and just use the firmware to choose which SSD to boot from. āYou gotta keep 'em separated.ā
And donāt try to think of it as āleaving Windows behindā. Try to think of it as āadding a new skill to your skill treeā. After all, your Windows knowledge will stil stay locked in your brain, and you still have the partition for it if you ever want to remind yourself the Windows experience. My brain learns best if there is a goal to it, not just learn to learn. So I set the goal of replacing everything I do in Windows 1:1 in Linux. That goal hasnāt been met, but it got me close enough where Linux is now my primary OS. Again, the only time I need Windows is only certain games that I just cannot play in Linux such as Call of Duty (anti-cheat). I play mostly Overwatch 2 and it plays great in Linux.
Also, in addition to all the stuff I do on a daily basis for work (as a Windows System Admin), I finally got VSCode set up to deal with AWS/Terraform so I donāt even need Windows for that either. I can RDP into other domain-joined servers if need be over RDG.
I know you also develop and do creative work, so youāll have your own challenges. And I hope you will see them that way as well: fun challenges to overcome, not a wall. After all, you can always boot back into Windows if the project is time sensitive, but can always go back into trying to find ways to do the same in Linux when you have your hobby time.
And as someone explained, the different distros donāt really make the ecosystem worse. Really, a lot of the heavy lifting is the kernel, so as long as you use a distro that uses a fairly new version of the kernel, youāre good. Thatās why I personally like Fedora and PopOS. And thatās only if you tend to get relatively new hardware. For example, I replaced the MediaTek WIFI on the FW16 with a Qualcomm WIFI7 module that didnāt work until kernel 6.11.0 came out. Even then it was really buggy. Weāre now at 6.11.8 on Fedora and itās so much better. The speed still isnāt there for me (400 Mbps vs 1.1 Gbpe in Windows), and BT audio doesnāt work, but this is why I like having a distro that is closer to the edge (but not too close like Arch) - new hardware support.
GreyXor here on the forums informed me that BT audio fix has been committed and so we should even see that fixed in a future kernel version (6.13 probably).
The other things that surround the kernel is just other packages (boot, init system, programs, applications, daemons, desktop environment, window manager, etc). A distro is just a packaging of all of that stuff and how it is maintained.
Again, I recommend Arch for you. I typically donāt for ābeginnersā, but youāre a special kind of beginner. I can see youāre the kind who understands bootloaders, partitioning, swap files/partitions, etc. You know about packages Iām sure, but to realize that every critical component of the Linux OS including the init system are just packages and how to install each one yourself will open your mind to some mad scientist thought process.
Eventually youāll come back down to earth and want a stable and usable OS - and thatās where youāll try to find a distro that matches your own computing and usage philosophy. Like I said, for me those would be Fedora and PopOS - with me leaning PopOS for linux beginners (WIndows users like a friend of mine) or people like my mom (in fact, sheās been using it for 3 years - and rarely a call from her about her PC!) and Fedora for myself (who only wants to deal with unmodified vanilla Gnome).
Huhā¦ I guess if someone asks me for a Linux distro, and they arenāt the kind that had to install DOS in a very bootlegged way (ex: sys C:, md DOS, pkunzip A:\dos1.zip C:\DOS, pkunzip A:\dos2.zip C:\DOS), Iād pick PopOS. For you, I choose Arch because if you get what I did in my example, then - youāre that person, lol.
And Fedora if you really want a vanilla experience (but you can always customize just like with any distro).
There isnāt a lot of space for a mouse, but I just turn up the sens and I can still do pretty well on Overwatch 2.