At the time my main goal is to have to all of my games working, while I can make it run on every distro I tried, I found Vanilla Arch is the better one in terms of performance and ease of use (yeah call me weird for saying Arch is easier to use than other distros XD), so I keep using it ever since.
I'm guessing you're on Nvidia system?, I never had a program glitching or crashing on me ever since I make the switch (I exclusively use Wayland and never touch X11 once), maybe a laptop specific issue just like I can't get my fingerprint sensor to work on my machine, but luckily it's not a deal breaker for me
That's fine, I can look up the Arch Wiki for solutions, which is also a learning process for me and if it still doesn't work, I can just duct tape the workaround myself XD
No it's not, I don't have any reason to encrypt my drives, but you can try it for yourself it's only require a few basic commands to setup and no risk involved
VMware workstation is free, it's not open source but it's faster than VirtualBox, if you want GPU passthrough KVM is the only choice but require quite bit of effort to setup
I used SketchUp web for my modeling (it's free), for the life of me I can't figured out Freecad, it's a few open source softwares I can't warp my head around
Yeah it's quite nice and more fun to use than Windows, I admit it's pretty hectic on my first week of switching, but after learning a few commonly used terminal commands and open source softwares, I can do pretty much almost anything some time without needing to use DE I can just use tty instead
Haha thanks but it's not actually my first distro, I'm distro hopping on my first week of switching to Linux, my first ever distro is EndeavourOS>Nobara>Fedora>OpenSUSE>Vanilla Arch
Not surprising considering how well Linux support on Thinkpad laptop are.