linuxmemes

For the vast majority of usecases it is ready, niche applications sure, but most people could use linux these days.

For me Linux surpassed the Windows desktop experience in 1996 and even though Windows 2000 was a pretty good upgrade, I don't think it has surpassed desktop Linux yet. Windows 10 was not bad either, but now that has gone mostly downhill whereas Linux has merely plateaud at worst or has been improving slowly at best.

I mostly just game and browse the Internet and my daily driver is Linux. I have not come across anything that I needed Windows for so far, in a year and a half of not using Linux. There may be some games I was vaguely interested in that don't run easily on Linux, but day to day tasks, 3d printing/slicing software, basic image editing software, browsers, coding IDEs, all work native on Linux.

Sure, if there is a specific software that you really want to use, maybe that specific software isn't available on Linux. But one individual running into multiple things that only run on Windows sounds like it is a fairly specific use case. At best, someone might need to use an alternative program. At worst, maybe that person needs to keep a windows environment around. But that doesn't seem like the case for the majority of people.

extremely not tech-savvy

You managed to make an account and post on Lemmy so you're probably underestimated your technical knowledge. That being said IMHO it's best to first list what software you use then find alternatives that work on Linux. Once that's done then yes sure try whatever distribution you want.

Sure, here are instructions for getting Linux Mint running: https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

These instructions are for creating a USB flash drive that functions as both a live environment or an installer. If you don't want to install it yet, this allows you to try it out while booting just from the flash drive, without modifying your hard drive at all.

Give CachyOS a shot

https://cachyos.org/

I do free infinite troubleshooting on matrix and specialize in this exact situation, feel free to message me. I recommend something based on immutable fedora because it's breakage resistant (immutable means the core system is read only and updates all at once on reboot) and fedora because it's very up to date but still stable, try aurora (it's fedora immutable with some small improvements)

do kde, always kde or gnome unless you know what you're doing, but kde is better

If you're not humblebragging, perhaps you oughta get a Linux-preinstalled laptop like System76.

If you were humblebragging, check out https://fedoraproject.org/workstation/ and get the Plasma edition.

I mean, 10 minutes is pretty optimistic even for a relatively savy user. It took me somewhere around an hour to find and fix everything. On the other hand, it took me and a bunch of people on the Linux support subreddit around 20 hours of troubleshooting to get Linux into a mostly functional state on my PC, at which point I and everyone else had given up, so...

Its been nearly two years since then though, and given what a nightmare Windows 11 is, I guess I'll have to give it another shot.

10 minutes is enough only for "Oh, that's too difficult, let's pretend that I'm content with Windows as it is"

If you know the right tool for the task, very few things take time. IMHO what's more problematic is that with enshitification you're swimming upstream. Sure as long as the maintainer finds the right trick, you can postpone indefinitely bad "surprises" but ultimately, why do so when proper alternatives more aligned with your Worldview exist?