Food for thought: you should start getting familiar with Linux, either with Virtualbox/VMware, or dual booting right now. When the time comes and Win10 reaches EOL, you know you will find reasons to just go with the flow and stay with Microsoft.
As for what flavor? There are a few that come to mind as "windowy": Zorin, Mint, and the anything that uses KDE Plasma. Personally, I prefer Pop!_OS because I use MacOS as well and prefer that feel to windows a bit more, and System76 has done a fantastic job of making a polished product.
That's what I did, anyway. The mental load of still having windows to fall back on if I couldn't do something helped make the anxiety lighter and also helped me be motivated to try new things out. I couldn't imagine having to learn something with a gun to my head!
I'm seconding the "no Facebook" thing, and I'd add "no Meta-Owned anything". Facebook is constantly showing me conspiracy flat earth shit with people honest to god arguing about it, and everyone in other posts strangely all comment the same thing or early similar things to the point that I've checked peoples accounts out to see if they are bots or not. Instagram isn't much better, and a LOT of it is basically soft-core attention seeking influencers. Threads.... Isn't giving anything better than what Mastodon offers.
Totally 100% prefer distro or distro family + problem to anything in MS forums. My problem solving literacy has improved so much just by getting smart on terminal commands. I am by no means a pro and have a long way to go before I would consider myself even moderately proficient, but goddamn is the terminal satisfying.
It really is crazy how far it's come. I started fooling around a bit with Linux back when Ubuntu 16.04 was released, but didn't really get into it until 20.04. Valve and proton are incredible on the gaming side.
I was thinking more along the lines of whether my local wifi throughput was a bottleneck, not the connection on the other side of the router. As for the RAM, I'm sitting at 24gb, which runs smoothly on the host machine on both Linux and windows. Even when it is streaming the game upstairs, the host framerate is smooth--its the client that is stuttering if the host is running HL from windows.
Your guess is as good as mine. It runs well on my windows partition and probably slightly faster on Linux. I tried streaming several games, and they all lagged terribly. I tried resetting the wireless router, and installed Sunshine/Moonlight. With S/M, it would be fine and then about every 30-35 seconds it would lag for about 5-7 seconds. It was able to stream fairly smoothly at 720p if set to "performance" in the moonlight settings.
Everything points towards a slow local wifi connection, or something hogging the bandwidth in the background. I ran a speed test that came back with 250Mbit download/35Mbit upload, so it didn't seem like that was the problem. I also turned off OneDrive and ensured no updates or downloads were happening concurrently. I haven't tried doing a pcap because that's beyond the amount of effort I really want to put into it.
I don't really use windows for anything other than a handful of games I was streaming up to the steam link upstairs, so the easy option is to wipe it and start over I think.
I went over initially because I heard rumors of Windows 11 adding ads to the file viewer and that scared me. I prefer not having my hands held anymore.
KOTOR 1. Taris is cool but let's be honest. I play that game because I like playing a Jedi. I've also played it from start to finish at least 20 times.
Those kids are going to remember you for the rest of their lives. Try using ChatGPT for any questions you might have with your game. It has helped me in a pinch.
Same. I heard MS was checking out the possibility of adding advertising in the file explorer. I don't know the veracity of the reports or where I saw them, but it spooked me enough that I knew I needed to get started familiarizing myself with something else before I had no options.
I loved Windows 7. It hurts a little every time I come across someone still running it as a daily driver and I recoil in horror as I recommend basically anything else
Plus they are working on COSMIC which looks SAF. That's honestly the only thing that has kept me from distro hopping.