Been a long time Windows user but with each Windows version, I hate it more. So bloated and locked in. I saw that mint is a good beginner distribution but its not supported by framework. Is Ubuntu really different from Windows with a higher learning curve?
Talk me out of wasting hours to get linux working when Windows works out-of-the-box
It depends greatly what you’re doing with your computer. I’ve been an Ubuntu primary user for at least a decade now, but there are still one or two things I can’t do with Linux… at least not as easily. Specifically in my case I have a PC dedicated to my synthesiser/MIDI setup simply because drivers, tools and plugins are readily available and supported on Windows while in Linux the support is good but has issues. A prime example is that my main synths are Roland synths, and Roland has a bad habit of not supporting standards fully for audio or MIDI over USB. I love my Roland synths but it made it too difficult to go Linux primary. That and some of the best tools are Windows-based like Ableton. However, that’s not to say you can’t do all of this in Linux; Renoise is a fantastic DAW as well that runs natively in Windows or Linux and there are plenty of great audio editing tools… it’s just interfacing with external gear is sometimes problematic and again some of my synths are plugins (VST’s) that either don’t work or aren’t well supported in environments other than Windows and Mac.
If your primary use case is web browsing and maybe gaming (Steam works great with their Proton runtimes for most games) then you can easily switch to Linux and never miss a beat. Firefox and Chromium (not Chrome) are great and well supported, and while Microsoft Office isn’t directly supported you can run the web Office365 just fine or install LibreOffice and still mostly be able to edit documents and files. For photo editing and the like there’s GIMP and if you’re a photographer there are amazing tools like DarkTable that are absolutely brilliant and in some cases are so good I would run them on Windows as well.
Ubuntu is probably one of the most mature and well-supported distros out there. Mint is also good and you won’t have any trouble with it, but when you do have issues with it the amount of support you can get for Ubuntu is among the best. There are things that Canonical do that annoy the Linux purists (systemd, Wayland as prime examples) for the average user these issues are pretty much moot. Even I who first installed Slackware Linux in 1993 and liked it don’t really care too much because the operating system gets out of my way and just works. I have one tool that requires me to run Xorg instead of Wayland (the GUI framwork… it’s complicated) but that’s literally the only issue I’ve had.
HTH