To be fair, testing in a VM is for seeing the basic fundamentals of the OS. Ok, let me try to help with a couple of things then.

For finding you distro:

1. Find your favourite environment. Is it GNOME, is it KDE, Cinnamon, maybe it’s Xmonad or dwm? There are a lot of these and you should test this first. Distro doesn’t really matter in this step. Just find one with the desired environment and test it in a VM.
2. Once you find your perfect environment, find out if you want a really stable system or something cutting edge? Maybe something balanced in between. Distro still doesn’t matter in this step. Once you decide what you want, now you can find distros that suit this.
3. Choose you favourite init system (Optional). Some people like to control what’s under the hood. Just note that, not choosing systemd will filter a lot of distros here. If you don’t care what’s under the hood, skip this step.
4. Now you have narrowed down to possibly 3-10 distros. Still a lot. However this step is where you choose your favourite package manager. If you don’t care about the mechanism, just pick one you liked from the default installations of them. If you are using Linux for some time, you might already have a favourite package manager.
5. Congratulations, you have found your distro. Just use it and see for yourself.
6. Wait, it might still not be the correct one. However you cannot know this without using them daily. Some people stay with what distro they start, some people distrohop a lot and settle on Debian. And some other love their niche distro that works nicely for them. Stay with what really clicks with you.

Why don’t you try distros in a virtual machine first?

Then Sway might be a better fit for you. Though I definitely recommend Niri, since it’s a fresh look for tiling WMs.

Sway is also nice if you prefer more traditional tiling WM.

I suggest Void Linux and putting Niri + noctalia-shell on it.

I actually like systemd-boot more than GRUB. I see it for 1 second, so I really don’t see the point of theming a bootloader but this is the world of freedom. Any preference is welcome.

Technically it’s a pop-up. You cannot use the window behind when that’s open. If you try to carry the pop-up, it will also carry the main window.

My initial reason was computation freedom. It got so much better in years, I just take the rest as a great bonus.

It’s been 4 years already? WTF?

You should check out BraveOS at this point I think.

It sounds like you would enjoy Linux though you should at least know that running your games will need additional hoops comparing to Windows since they’re Windows games, nothing something wild and will be mostly about changing the default WINE to Proton if you use Lutris or Heroic for them. However sometimes you will probably need to troubleshoot for some game time to time, but you’ll get used to that once you learn the idea.

Linux Mint is likely the safest choice here. Zorin is also fine for newbies.

Also note that, a lot of things will be different than Windows, though you can always search for an equivalent for something you used. At least the structure is much more beautiful on Linux, unlike Windows’ chaotic nature.

Hello fellow X201 user. I too used EndeavourOS on my X201 for a long time, though currently I’m using Void on it (which I like a lot more). While KDE runs on it fine I mostly preferred river+waybar+fuzzel setup. Intel iGPU on this device really sucks by the way. :)

WELL well _well

Are they Linux ISOs or “Linux ISOs”?

Yeah, no idea why it was marked as obsolete but at least I didn’t have to meddle with configs for that. Maybe because of upgrading 2 versions in a row.

That’s good news! Mine had some quirks like I had to uninstall and reinstall Jellyfin and some couple things for some reason too.

But yeah, I would like some more automated upgrade as well. Though Debian itself is a manual installation so current situation makes sense.

Actually I was searching about that Youtube one that I saw long ago but couldn’t find again. Thank you for these. Especially for awesome-mpv.

I haven’t seen something like this but I’ve seen someone replicated Youtube UI, including thumbnail previews on seekbar. I’ve also seen some quite simple and clear UIs as well. mpv has so many capabilities, I probably don’t know about 95% of them.

I’m pretty sure mpv’s UI can turn into this. I’ve seen some crazy things.

CPUs are usually fine. It’s the GPUs that need updates faster, especially Nvidia. However I generally love to have new features as soon as possible too. On the other hand, I like the slowest updates as possible on my home server.