I do obviously know that avahi is bloat, but it's a dependency of PulseAudio, preventing me from removing it

With the right amount of customization yeah it can look really fancy. I could be mistaken but I recall Elementary OS' Pantheon came from xfce/xubuntu originally.

However I'm still partial to KDE/Plasma personally as it does 99% of what I need out of the box.

That's the great thing about Linux though. It's exactly as bespoke and custom as you want to make it.

All desktop environments are fancy compared to a simple window manager.

Webcord is another good client. It is more so designed for security and isolation, but supports theming and plugins. Vencord (more specifically Vesktop) is probably a more interesting client.

If you can live without Discord, then Matrix or Revolt could be of interest.

Discord, definitely!! It might be hard to ditch but it's worth trying. I was never a big fan of it so it was kinda easy yet I still miss being able to contact some people on there. But the more people continue using it, the harder it will be to change things.

Spotify and Chromium, I agree on both as well. Try the options mentioned above concerning Spotify. And yeah, Music streaming is a hard one... I have a dedicated mobile device for Music streaming platforms of this kind if I feel the itch as well as a modded ipod for on the go. Besides that using Bandcamp on a seperate user profile on a Pixel with Graphene OS, no Google stuff installed however and it works pretty great. Highly recommend getting into a habit of buying Music (digital/physical) and listening stuff you actually own on desktop. Simple cmus or sth will do the job.

Maybe Librewolf or other Firefox fork for Browser.

Edit: typo. Edit 2: I'd keep a chromium-based Browser of some sort, you might need it sometime for something. Just use different Browsers for different things.

I'm using Degoogled Chromium. Regular Chromium sucks.

Flatpak sucks in my opinion. What if i need to install something that is not on flatpak? The AUR exists too.

Why stop at Windows? There is so much other Microsoft crap to ditch.

Not to excuse MS crap, but you consented by not managing the system during setup. If you accept defaults, you're consenting to what someone else thinks about how your system runs.

I've never once had Windows do updates behind my back, because I configure the update system as part of setup. At work, we manage the updates for all systems.

True.

Bluefin (MacOS look) or Aurora (Windows look) are great starter Linux distros. It won't give you the typical Linux experience (mostly that you won't really need to do much terminal stuff).

If you won't a more typical Linux experience, I recommend Fedora Workstation (the KDE spin if you want that Windows look).

For getting a idea of how your games run check out protondb.com you can add your steam library to easily check your library.

For epic, gog and Amazon prime gaming you got heroic (https://heroicgameslauncher.com/) it also uses proton to play windows games.

GPU drivers are fine. AMD just works for gaming and Nvidia (depending on distro you need to install the drivers, search how to install them and dont install them from the Nvidia website) works fine if you just have a simple setup. The Nvidia drivers are improving alot by the way.

Random mouse, keyboard and other stuff is a hot or miss. Most of the time basic stuff simply works, but maybe there are no drivers/programma to set rgb or macros. (P.s. Try open rgb for rgb stuff)

You can always try with a dual boot. If you not used to Linux and like gaming maybe something like pop os

As you've probably heard, it's basically just NVidia with shitty drivers. They are getting better but are not included in many distros (they can usually be added through the package manager pretty easily) since they are proprietary. Intel and AMD generally work out of the box for gaming. NVidia drivers are bad enough that I sold my 2060 for an ARC a750 just because of the drivers lol.

Not a big gamer, myself, but it seems like Valve has done a lot of work to make many (most?) Steam games run well under Linux.

Drivers have come a long way, and a lot of things just work, but it can definitely depend on what hardware is in your system.

Just install and try to resolve all your issues (if any) in a dualboot. That way you can always go back to Windows if something doesn't work. But if your experience is anything like mine, you'll find that 99% works either out of the box or after some minimal configuration. The only notable exception for me are online games that insist on intrusive anti-cheat software (e.g. BattleEye) and choose not to support Proton/Wine on Linux. Curse you, Escape from Tarkov!

I'm still newish to gaming on Linux but from what I've heard Nvidia drivers are hit or miss but much better then they used to be. AMD graphics are well supported and using a mix of Proton though Steam and Wine I haven't really had any issues with games. I have an ROG Ally running Bazzite and a gaming PC running Vanilla OS 2, both do just fine. Additionally hosting game servers on my Debian server has been fine as well.

If you're on the fence I'd recommend installing on a separate drive and giving it a try.

Nah. Regular arch is good. (except from systemd)

Just don't use software that comes from anywhere. Probably solved