Been using Manjaro XFCE for a minute, KDE is great if you're rocking ~32GB of RAM but for lightweight, MX Linux (Debian), Lubuntu (LXDE) Lightweight Ubuntu. Most distros come with drivers that trackpads and wireless just ..work. So many flavors but with KDE you can customize everything with rightclicking, no config edits. It's fun, but lower end machines I'd suggest XFCE, KDE will use 2GB of RAM just idling on desktop.
I ditched Windows completely back in 2017-2018 and haven't looked back. I'm no star-programmer or star sys-admin or anything but the love of tinkering with things, VMs, networking, sockets, SSH, SCP, rsync, having direct access to my kernel (like sysctl stuff), managing my ssh keys in ~/.ssh/, using a drop-down Quake style terminal (Tilda) has been a dream.
Why would somebody want to sign on with a 'cloud account' for their desktop login, have forced stuff like Teams, Edge (Are you SURE YOU WANT TO SWITCH TO CHROME/FIREFOX? notifications), OneDrive, and have things like Recall pushed on them.
Linux isn't rocket science any more there's Add/Remove programs on every distro and people can browse from there, there's software pulled straight from github for compiling/installing as well as the 'app store' for exploring.
It's been my tinkerer's heaven. Most you need is a trustable VPN with a killswitch that runs Wireguard and your linux install is going to be great.
Gaming wise, well gaming needs to get their heads out of their asses and dev for Linux and respect that just because there's not yet manjority market share doesn't mean there won't be.
Disposable OS now adays is just boot a live CD (USB) that loads everything in to RAM with NVidia drivers already loaded.
Try a bunch of linux distros .isos in oracle VMs or any VM managers, use Ventoy to put the ISOs on a flash drive, my 128GB stick lets me have dozens of them, and boot any distro you want you can have as many ISOs that will fit, they'll all boot when you select which one you want.
As much as I dislike KDE, this is just not true. Perhaps you mean your whole system idles at 2GB including all other running services?
To anyone new to Linux, I recommend sticking to Wayland. Gnome if you're familiar with MacOS, KDE if coming from Windows. Use a popular distro with good documentation online (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch).
Don't worry too much about memory. Just about anything will be lighter than windows. I've had friends choose the absolute worst X11 desktops because it's "light" then run into all sorts of multi monitor issues
I'm talking utilizing it with the desktop widgets, tools, customizations cool taskbar widgets (I'd add the openAI app), different system informations/rss feeds embedded across multiple monitors.. the stuff KDE is awesome for.
KDE is amazing. I love it. My little laptop though I get by with just XFCE on an i3 8GB RAM, 250GB NVMe SSD.
Agreed on everything else you said. People switching from Mac's ultra-HD for fonts get the 'ick' switching to Linux desktop too. We'll get there.
I replied to an above comment, not when utilizing KDE's widgets and other desktop integrations like RSS feeds, weather, embedded system/server informations, etc. KDE is amazing, but I like to utilize the widgets, and full functionality of things with it. With my i3, 8GB RAM I opted for Manjaro XFCE.
I absolutely suggest using KDE for people switching over. Full desktop experience.
When not using anything my systems would idle at around 800MB-1GB running default install Manjaro. Firefox after awhile and I was using the full 8GB and tabs were crashing.
Been using Manjaro XFCE for a minute, KDE is great if you're rocking ~32GB of RAM but for lightweight, MX Linux (Debian), Lubuntu (LXDE) Lightweight Ubuntu. Most distros come with drivers that trackpads and wireless just ..work. So many flavors but with KDE you can customize everything with rightclicking, no config edits. It's fun, but lower end machines I'd suggest XFCE, KDE will use 2GB of RAM just idling on desktop.
I ditched Windows completely back in 2017-2018 and haven't looked back. I'm no star-programmer or star sys-admin or anything but the love of tinkering with things, VMs, networking, sockets, SSH, SCP, rsync, having direct access to my kernel (like sysctl stuff), managing my ssh keys in ~/.ssh/, using a drop-down Quake style terminal (Tilda) has been a dream.
Why would somebody want to sign on with a 'cloud account' for their desktop login, have forced stuff like Teams, Edge (Are you SURE YOU WANT TO SWITCH TO CHROME/FIREFOX? notifications), OneDrive, and have things like Recall pushed on them.
Linux isn't rocket science any more there's Add/Remove programs on every distro and people can browse from there, there's software pulled straight from github for compiling/installing as well as the 'app store' for exploring.
It's been my tinkerer's heaven. Most you need is a trustable VPN with a killswitch that runs Wireguard and your linux install is going to be great.
Gaming wise, well gaming needs to get their heads out of their asses and dev for Linux and respect that just because there's not yet manjority market share doesn't mean there won't be.
Disposable OS now adays is just boot a live CD (USB) that loads everything in to RAM with NVidia drivers already loaded.
My suggestion to anybody, check out Ventoy: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
Try a bunch of linux distros .isos in oracle VMs or any VM managers, use Ventoy to put the ISOs on a flash drive, my 128GB stick lets me have dozens of them, and boot any distro you want you can have as many ISOs that will fit, they'll all boot when you select which one you want.
For the nerds: https://www.ghostbsd.org - BSD Desktop.
Say no to Recall.
</rant>