I miss Windows 8 in ways. I'm one of the crazy people who actually was fine with it from the word go, I used it in preview channel from a month before they put Tiles in all the way until Win 10 preview. For me, the memory stability it offered was so much better than Windows 7 that I couldn't turn back to 7. (I also used Start 8 and later on, Classic Shell to "fix" the start menu as early as a few days after the retail release happened)
Yeah, I joined the "all Intel" camp after AMD burned me a few too many times in the aughts, but a friend's an AMD addict and convinced me to try it out again with the 5000 series... and then I ended up falling back to the 3700x.
I'm still amazed how few cores/threads most consumer PCs have.
I think I mentioned previously, but I'm planning on keeping an 8.1 install going past end of support for any vital Windows needs, and if that can't run a particular thing, then I wont use that thing lol.
My previous pc was a quad core so I've gone from 4/8 up to 10/20 in a single upgrade, I do tend to keep my PCs for long periods (excluding actual hardware death) therefore I try to get the best I can each time. My old PC was a real champ tho, I still love it, it's been my main PC for maybe 7+ years, only recently did it start to struggle in big sim games.
Looks like I'll need to try Weyland, then, the tearing drives me up the wall. (My old setup was three 60hz monitors, I wonder why it had so much trouble...) I've actually been curious about Weyland for a while- WSL2 is using it to run native Linux apps in Windows on insider previews. (They're just dragging it out forever in classic Microsoft fashion.)
Well in my setup I'm using old Xorg and I don't have tearing issues, I have 2 monitors and only one is used for gaming, that one is what the gpu syncs to. Sometimes it is not the fault of the x server, it can be the composter for the window manager and others. When I was fixing mine I think I had 4 or 5 places I had to make a small tweak, like 1 setting in each. Note that I am using old display tech here, a 1070ti and an old monitor, there is no g-sync or freesync on this thing lol. It is 1920x1080 at 60Hz and that is enough for me at the moment. I've not tried Wayland myself yet, it is meant to be in the latest Debian 11, but I have not tried that either yet, I'm still on Debian 10.
I knew about Proton from friends talking about it recently, but my last attempt at switching to Linux used Play on Linux and Wine. Lutris is new to me, I'll definitely look close at that one. There's also something that caught my eye called WinApps for shimming apps in a VM into a native app looking box? It caught my eye since there's a handful of apps I know are just... never going to get there. (Photoshop CC, Office, etc.)
I have not tried WinApps or the whole Windows VM route yet, its on the list of 'thats cool, I should try that' things but not got around to any of it. In terms of desktop apps, Adobe CC and Sony/Magix Movie Studio are the ones I have that are sill in Windows only land. I have started using Gimp to do graphics items, if I can get happy with that and drop Photoshop then it will just be InDesign on the Adobe front, but really I don't actually need them, Gimp has managed to do everything I have needed, and I since the death of J-Zine I only need InDesign for one project every couple years, and for that I can just use a second PC. Same with Movie Studio, I don't do much with video anymore but if I do need it, my old PC can handle it.
Yeah, when I tackled it before I blitzed everything straight through to where I had all the core drivers working and then set up Windows 7 in a VM for anything I couldn't figure out yet, so I was able to slowly wean myself off without resorting to actual dual boot. I figured I'd do the same this time, but I also have a spare machine that can keep living in Windows land, just in case.
Sounds like a good plan.
I'll download both and make live USBs and see what I think. I usually tend to use some Debian descendant in Live USB form for my IT work, so I'm already somewhat comfortable with it, although it's been so long my command line is rusty. My longest adventure with Linux was under Mint. Will probably be a few days before I can give it a shot in either case. (I have some family coming over when I get up, and I expect Monday to be a "damnit phone, stop ringing" day.)
Its totally up to you, but if you go the Debian 10/KDE/xorg/nvidia route on a PC, then I can probably help a bit more as that is what I'm running, and already had to fix lol. I do want to try Arch, it is on that list I mentioned earlier, but I don't have another new enough GPU to run a second system. My next best GPU is a 560TI, which is just 1 generation before Vulcan was a thing, and so all the Proton stuff doesn't work on it. Mint is nice and user friendly, and is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, but the Debian folks tend to refer to it as a 'Franken Debian', because they tend to like re-inventing the wheel for the sake of it and doing non-standard things. That and their original weird attitude to upgrades (just install fresh) put me off Mint.
It is also the point that I have been using Linux long enough that to be using the distro that is regarded as the 'easy' one, it feels like a cop out on my part, nothing wrong with Mint or Ubuntu, I just feel it would be the lazy move, in other words I should be able to get an original distro working, and if I can't then thats me failing, and I should learn more lol. I once built one of my new servers in OpenBSD, no prep or anything first, I just decided I wanted the challenge, and it was really good fun. Maybe I should move Fansub to OpenBSD lol.