One thing I'll say is that for a lot of distros these days you shouldn't really need to use the terminal much if ever. That being said don't be scared of the terminal. It's just another way to tell the computer what to do. It takes some learning but if you want to learn things with the terminal you might eventually find it easier/faster than using the mouse for some things. Go through some tutorials and you'll probably find out that the terminal is not that actually all that scary.
Most distros allow you to try them out before you install them. You can run them from a USB stick to let you try a few out before you settle on one. You won't be able to install any programs this way but you'll at least be able to get an idea of the interface and see if there are any you like more than others. Even still you can dual boot your PC with Windows + Linux and switch back and forth whenever you need. It's not an all or nothing ordeal. I still have windows 10 on my machine but I rarely use it now.
Gaming on Linux is better than it's ever been thanks to Steam coming with proton out of the box. protondb.com is your friend for figuring out what games you can run. That being said there are occasionally some rough edges that I have run into personally. I can run most games I want just fine but occasionally I have some issues. I'm just telling you this so you know it's not like a flawless experience. Then again I've also spent plenty of time trying to get games running on my windows PC in the past too so...
My recommendation for a first Linux OS is Ubuntu because in general it's the most popular and has the most support.
I'm using the android app and I've found it decent. I think the UI/UX could use some quality of life improvements but it's a simple and straightforward app to use.
I'm not on the main pixelfed.social instance but mine went down for a bit this morning. I just waited a bit and then I was able to login again.
Mastodon and Lemmy also had a lot of trouble even they experienced these huge waves of migrations partly because no one had scaled the software this far before
Mastodon is an app for sharing text that can also share pictures and videos. Pixelfed is an app for sharing pictures and videos with limited text.
You can curate a feed of pictures on Mastodon by following hashtags like #cats or #catstodon, but the interface is going to always emphasize the text first. Meanwhile on Pixelfed I can follow those same hashtags and get a much better experience for a feed primarily of pictures. Even though many/most of the posts will inevitably come from Mastodon users I can still browse those in my Pixelfed app in a much cleaner way. Artists can post their work from a Mastodon account, but the best way to view all their posts is going to be from Pixelfed.
This is why interoperability is a good thing. The whole point of federation is that different apps can implement their own version of the spec to curate a different type of user experience.
I don't do Instagram either but PixelFed has pretty chill vibes. I followed some hashtags like #cat and #nature and now I have a nice little feed of cats and nature.
It makes sense that they're playing it safe this time around. They've already had successors to well selling consoles due to gimmicks (*ahem Wii U). The Switch is already a well selling console so it seems like they're just making the same thing but with better performance and some usability improvements.
Even then sometimes manufacturers will still use Amazon for fulfillment and shipping. I agree though, the shopping experience is pretty awful and I try to avoid it
Yeah it's like if you had a calculator and 10% of the time it gave you the wrong answer. Would that be a good tool for learning? We should be careful when using these tools and understand their limitations. Gen AI may give you an answer that happens to be correct some of the time (maybe even most of the time!) but they do not have the ability to actually reason. This is why they give back answers that we understand intuitively are incorrect (like putting glue on pizza), but sometimes the mistakes can be less intuitive or subtle which is worse in my opinion.
And it's also a way for topic focused servers to filter out signups as well. There are general purpose instances with open sign ups that don't do that.
Yeah if the settings panel had feature parity with control panel but with a better user experience nobody would mind but it's less features AND a worse experience.
I remember trying to change some mouse settings on windows 10 but they removed the ability to get to the old mouse options from the desktop. I drilled down through the settings app and eventually buried deep I found where it would let me open up that same old mouse settings modal to get to what I wanted to change. More clicks, more searching, and less features = poor user experience
One thing I'll say is that for a lot of distros these days you shouldn't really need to use the terminal much if ever. That being said don't be scared of the terminal. It's just another way to tell the computer what to do. It takes some learning but if you want to learn things with the terminal you might eventually find it easier/faster than using the mouse for some things. Go through some tutorials and you'll probably find out that the terminal is not that actually all that scary.
Most distros allow you to try them out before you install them. You can run them from a USB stick to let you try a few out before you settle on one. You won't be able to install any programs this way but you'll at least be able to get an idea of the interface and see if there are any you like more than others. Even still you can dual boot your PC with Windows + Linux and switch back and forth whenever you need. It's not an all or nothing ordeal. I still have windows 10 on my machine but I rarely use it now.
Gaming on Linux is better than it's ever been thanks to Steam coming with proton out of the box. protondb.com is your friend for figuring out what games you can run. That being said there are occasionally some rough edges that I have run into personally. I can run most games I want just fine but occasionally I have some issues. I'm just telling you this so you know it's not like a flawless experience. Then again I've also spent plenty of time trying to get games running on my windows PC in the past too so...
My recommendation for a first Linux OS is Ubuntu because in general it's the most popular and has the most support.
Best of luck!