Finally had enough of Windows. I'm packing up. I'm nervous!

https://lemmy.world/post/5961010

Finally had enough of Windows. I'm packing up. I'm nervous! - Lemmy.world

Hey! Today is the day. I finally got fed up with Windows booting up with an advert that I already had yesterday and had clicked on “remind me in three days” reluctantly. I’m finally tired of killing Telemetry. Now that gaming is less important for me, I feel like now is a good time to switch mainly to Linux. I might keep a small spare drive with a Windows/Steam partition for the occasional incompatible game. I’ve just started transferring my precious files to an external drive and I’m preparing for my Exodus. Still unsure about the distro I’ll choose, I would like to avoid distro hoping. But now I made up my mind, I’m leaving windows for the foreseable future. I started self-hosting three months ago as a way to trialing Linux with the added bonus of being useful and my server is still up and alive so I’m confident I can use Linux without breaking it. Any welcoming tips? I’m a bit anxious about the big change, but also relieved I won’t have to put up with the bloat/adverts.

Start with something generic. Maybe not Ubuntu because of their recent hijinks. But something like Debian or Linux Mint. Just because it makes troubleshooting so much easier when because you can Google problems more easily.
Recent hijinks?
The snap crap has been going on for a while, but that doesn’t make it any better.
Mint is probably the best first distro currently, Debian feels “too stable” for desktop and you need to use flatpak a lot IMO.