Auster

Got a gaming laptop some months ago, and it is actually very powerful indeed. But it came with Win11 by default, only requiring the final setup. Now… How can a system lag a decent laptop so much.

Needless to say, it didn’t take much for me to decide to swap for good ol’ Mint Xfce, and even try out a few other Linux systems, and now, pretty much everything runs flawlessly, at most requiring to avoid using the ultra settings.

But indeed, Windows is bloat incarnated, and it only gets worse. So much so it even feels like Win10 on a VM can clog the whole system. Weird how that doesn’t happen with Win7, no matter how long I leave it open on a VM.

I’d suggest Linux Mint.

• Simple UI
• (Xfce version specifically) is very fast (within reason; it’s still a modern OS)
• It’s already pretty keyboard-centric and it can be improved further if you like tinkering (my reason for dropping Windows was precisely lack of keyboard-centric controls, so if I stick to Mint, I guess it’s good on that front)
• Keys can be custom mapped, although I guess most bigger Linux systems allow that either out of the box, or through 3rd party software
• Unsure what a “dotfile” is, so can’t comment on that
• And Mint is still slowly adding animations to its functions (to some people’s dismay), and I don’t feel lag when alt-tabbing around, so I guess it is snappy too

Besides, Windows can be very laggy even on supported hardware.

Looking for a more stable distro could be a good idea. Some distros are pretty much only PoC, or too niche to have a good support, or the beta channel of another, better supported distro.

Looks like it was around the end of March when Valve announced the date they’d end support for Win7 and Win8. So perhaps a part of the Windows userbase went to Linux. If for fear, as a final push to drop Windows, etc., I don’t know, but perhaps they may have influenced.

Previous 12 months:

June 2023: -0.03%
May 2023: +0.15%
April 2023: +0.48%
March 2023: -0.43%
February 2023: -0.11%
January 2023: no difference
December 2023: -0.06%
November 2022: +0.16%
October 2022: +0.05%
September 2022: -0.04%
August 2022: +0.04%
July 2022: +0.05%

It would seem Linux among Steam users shows a growth tendency.
Hopefully this tendency keeps going strong!

If you absolutely must get something from Google Play, I suggest Aurora Store, which acts as an alternative frontend for Google Play, so you don’t have to have GApps installed.

If you have use for command line programs, Termux, a terminal emulator, is a great option, and it also works with root.

For reading eBooks, I also have a recommendation, Librera Reader (but I’ll check the OP’s recommendation too).

Material Files and Simple File Manager are great file browsing tools. But if you need a file browser for root specifically, I recommend Material Files specifically.

I’d recommend Mint, because, from my experience, it’s pretty stable, UX is designed so terminal usage can be kept to a minimum (but you can still prioritize it if you want), support from programs is overall good, and it ditches snap. But worth noting that, if you need cutting edge features, Mint is not for you, as it seems to be the new Debian, where updates are traded off for stability.

About the reason for switching, it was something pretty small, actually:
Windows’ UX getting increasingly worse for keyboard-centric usage (it slowly but surely got to my nerves e.e" ). Added with my HDD with Win10 dying after 6 years, being impulsive and loving to learn new things, I set to test new systems, in search for the ideal UX for my needs. Then, the Linux distros fitted like a glove, even more so with how customizable they could be, and they became my main systems (Mint currently). Still, ever since stopping using Windows as my main system family, I don’t shy away from testing other systems. Even got the chance of testing Vista (surprisingly functional despite its infamy) and Macintosh 7 (I got very lucky in finding someone with such a computer).

And as mentioned before, a good part of Linux is being customizable. And surprisingly (from an outsider’s perspective), you don’t need to know coding most of the time! You just need to know how to do troubleshooting (which Linux programs more often than not facilitate by showing the error in detail). Also also, from an ADHD point of view, it is good for non-linear learning, since small things you learn in one activity can help immensely in other activities, potentially even helping with non-Linux systems.

But as a cautionary tale, not all things work on Linux, so it’s always good to have a back up system or system installation ISO around. And given Linux’s open nature, you either have companies working behind them, such as Canonical, Red Hat and Microsoft (this last one with their “Azure” server system), potentially deteriorating their systems for the sake of profit, or systems made from users to users, which then depend on the devs being interested in continuing development, so don’t expect your favorite distro to be supported or viable forever, and be ready to make the jump to other distros if you need to.

Given I avoid the Play Store as much as possible (don’t like it; it’s just a killswitch/rental service, at the end of the day), I sought readers distributed as APKs, and the best one I found (which is also FOSS) is Librera Reader, which also has pre-built APKs on F-Droid and Github:

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/

https://github.com/foobnix/LibreraReader/releases/latest

Not Ubuntu-based, but I saw a friend who’s mainly a Mac user comment well about Endless OS, which is Debian-based (so Ubuntu’s cousin). Maybe worth checking out?