Treat yourself with a nice new fast SSD and install it on that. Dual booting on the same drive is asking for Windows update to “randomly” nuke your bootloader.

Edge barrier! Finally!

I did it soon after switching to Linux Mint from Windows because I didn’t like how Cinnamon was handling multiple displays. It worked and was perfectly functional. But it was a little rough around the edges with the occasional glitch here and there. Not sure if it was because Mint wasn’t really meant to run Plasma or if it was just because it was running an older version of Plasma. But it was perfectly usable and I would have been happy to stick with it if there were no other solutions.

Before I got too comfy in my Mint install and after having familiarized myself with Linux better, I hopped between a few distros for a bit. LMDE6 with Plasma ran better but ultimately I switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and stuck with it since then. It is rock solid and runs Plasma 6. I should probably have given EndeavourOS a try as well but I’m now too settled and comfy to change.

Mind you, I am still a complete Linux noob and still have barely any idea of what I am doing so take it with a grain of salt.

I just can’t wait for 6.1 for the screen corner boundaries on multiple monitors. It’s the one feature that has been missing for way too long.

I was using Krita for almost everything anyway already. The only thing I still need Photoshop for is in the very rare times I need to add curved text to an image. And for that I have a Jack Sparrow edition of Photoshop that runs in a virtual machine that isn’t allowed to connect to the internet.

As someone who recently switched to Linux and doesn’t like to tinker much and doesn’t have very deep knowledge of Linux, I’ll share my experience. Whether you ultimately try or not is up to you.

Your requirements for accessibility suggests you should look into a distro with KDE Plasma as many said already. It is an extremely flexible and customizable DE.

I personally started with Mint and ended up somewhat wedging KDE in it because I didn’t like how cinnamon was handling multiple monitors. It worked but was a little rough around the edges in that setup, as it should be expected with a distro running a DE it wasn’t meant to. If you don’t mess with the DE however I’ve found Mint to be super easy and approachable. But ultimately it might not be what you need.

After doing a lot of research and comparisons I then switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with native KDE plasma. A few things took a little extra tinkering and learning to get them to work but after that it became the setup I am happy to stick with for a long while.

I have no experience with them but KUbuntu and Fedora Plasma Spin might be also good alternatives to look for.

Running games is very easy through stream and still relatively easy with Bottles, which is rather easy and straightforward to lean to use. As long as you have the right video drivers installed. I have an NVidia card which made it a little more complicated but I made it work still. My understanding is that this shouldn’t be any issues with AMD cards right out of the box.

Ultimately it will require you to learn a little here and there whenever you come across something you don’t know. But as someone who only has an extremely shallow understanding of how the OS works and basic common console commands I have found no problem so complicated that I couldn’t handle with a quick web search.

If you look back at the sci-fi movies that came out soon after lasers were invented, you could see that people had all sorts of crazy ideas of what a laser could be used to do and that a lot of them had absolutely no idea of what a laser really did. Ultimately, we’ve found out that most of those imagined uses were pure bullshit or extremely impractical, at least with the current state of the technology. It didn’t mean that the technology was useless. We ended up finding all sorts of useful purposes for it that they had never imagined, like disk players or barcode scanners. It only means that it took time for people to better understand what the real world applications of the new technology was and a lot of the initial assumptions were dead wrong.

AI is going through the same process. It will take time before the technology’s strengths and weaknesses are better understood by the masses so it can be better applied to more realistic uses. And for the commercialization of snake-oil applications for it remains confined to fringe markets.

By using the physical buttons on the display units. But then Plasma changes those settings back whenever it has a chance.

I was hesitant for a long while and ended up installing Linux Mint on an old SSD I had laying around this way there was no commitment.

Now I’m realizing I haven’t booted up my regular windows 10 drive ever since and am considering getting rid of it altogether.

On a side note I created a virtual machine on the Linux side that runs Windows 10 LTSC on it for a few other programs I sometimes need that would be very difficult or impossible to make work on Linux like Inventor, Office and Photoshop. It lives trapped in the box and isn’t allowed to connect to the internet. If I need to download something for it I download it on Linux and drag and drop it into the box. It’s like having a little pet Windows that you keep locked in a pen, so it works for you and only for you and it can’t escape to go into your house to spy on you and shit bloatware all over your carpet.

I have a Lexmark black and white laser printer which I’ve used lightly for years (went through one and a half paper packs so far) and it’s still going strong with the original toner cassette. And when I’ll need to replace it I know there are third party cassettes available on the market for it which are substantially cheaper than OEM. I bought it to replace a Brother inkjet printer which was just an ink/money pit despite being a Brother. Inkjet is absolute crap no matter the brand. HP makes it even worse with a ton of assholeish DRM layered on top.

Ultimately there are two big things to avoid: inkjet and HP. Look up a laser printer and make sure that there is third party cassette support for it before you buy. Brother is apparently good in laser but don’t necessarily limit yourself to that brand.