There is some obscure/proprietary hardware that doesn't play nicely with linux. Fingerprint readers may not work on laptops, for example. I've had trouble with a trackpad in the past.
adam
joined 11 months ago
Gentoo. I say this as someone who used to daily drive it.
And arch too.
As long as you are okay with using the web versions of office, you can basically go with any distro, since all of them have at least a web browser and virtualbox in their repositories, as well as vs code. Jetbrains also works (I've only used intellij but I assume the others are just as easy to set up). I've never tried visual studio on linux though, not sure how well that works.
Most linux distros don't need any tinkering to get up and running (sometimes drivers can be an issue), and you definitely don't need to know any commands to get started. A good place to start is distrochooser.
There are GUIs (graphical user interfaces) for basically anything nowadays. However, I definitely recommend learning the commandline later down the line, since it can be really powerful in automating mundane tasks or unlocking power you didn't even realize.
As for customization, a linux system is built in a modular way, so given enough experience, you will be able to replace any part of your system you don't like. Be that the desktop environment, the kernel configuration or the init system (Don't worry if you don't know what those are yet).
Gaming is fine if you make sure everything you want to play is supported. Protondb is a nice database where you can look up how well your games run under linux. It's mostly the anticheat in games that have issues, not the game itself.
EDIT: Don't worry about what others think of the workflow that works for you. There will always be elitist assholes telling you to run arch when you encounter a problem. Just ignore them.
If you don't mind self-hosting stuff, nextcloud with davx5 could be a great choice.
You can set exceptions to the cookie deletion in the security settings. I personally have everything I use frequently (invidious and stuff) to keep the login cookies. Or you can just completely disable that feature.
It's possible to run stable diffusion on amd cards, it's just a bit more tedious and a lot slower. I managed to get it working on my rx 6700 under arch linux just fine. Now that I'm on fedora, it doesn't really want to work for some reason, but I'm sure that it can be fixed as well, I just didn't spend enough time on it.
Nerd dictation is a simple to use and powerful voice-to-text utility that you can use to just type or you can script its output. In my experience it works quite well, although I don't really use it for dictation.
As someone who has daily driven gentoo in the past, I didn't see much benefit to compiling everything over my previous arch install. It was a mess to keep up long term and wasted a lot of power unnecessarily. I'm way more happy on fedora now.
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IMHO arch is way too overrated. It does include a lot of stuff in the repos that others don't have, but the benefit end there in my opinion. My experience on fedora has been way better.