I finally had enough of Win11 and downgraded to 10. What a difference! I can actually reliably change my audio outputs again with 2 clicks! I can get to old school settings panels with less hassle and digging too.
I know this comes off as a kidnapping victim saying “My old kidnapper let me use the shower”, but until all my games run well in Linux, I’m stuck here.
Which games do you play? In my experience the only ones that haven't worked are ones with a hefty (kernel-level) anti cheat or similar. Proton is surprisingly good at emulating windows games!
Most games I play work on Proton. It’s Destiny 2 that will get your account banned if you use Linux. I’ve invested too much time at this point to risk a ban, so I’ll need to wait until I finish the last DLC before I switch. I’ve run Suse and Redhat in the past, but the last time I attempted to game on Linux was Team Fortress 2. Based on my experience with SteamDeck, it wouldn’t be hard to get most games up and running.
I would do the same, but then I'd have to go back to Win10's laughably awful implementation of HDR support, and I can't have that. So instead I downloaded SoundSwitch to fix your first issue, and installed StartAllBack to fix the second (you could also simply pin the Control Panel to the Start menu).
I'm already aware of this (how could I not be? The story was on the front page for days) and I'm not worried about it. This isn't the first time Microsoft has blocked alternative taskbars; somebody always finds a workaround.
I dual boot Arch but mostly use Win11, cause KDE's implementation of HDR is even more fiddly and tedious. In 11, all I gotta do is enable the setting to use HDR, and it just works. I don't even have to calibrate my display cause my monitor has a setting to automatically process HDR content for me. All I gotta do is leave in-game calibrations at their default setting, and the monitor does the rest. Literally couldn't be easier. Win11 can even automatically convert SDR games to HDR (called "AutoHDR"), and my nVidia GPU can do the same for videos (streaming or local, unfortunately I can't find the setting in the Linux Nvidia drivers). And it just works effortlessly.
So yeah, that's why I still use Windows11. No other OS makes HDR so easy. (But TBF the monitor helps a lot too; LG C1, BTW.)
Everything runs fine on Linux, just follow the ten pages of commands and technical procedures to get them working and installed with your particular hardware.
...I like tinkering, but I don't like tinkering with stuff that should already just work by now. Linux should already just work by now, I keeping waiting to switch to it, I keep finding out nothing has changed, and you still need to know a bunch of archaic command line stuff just to get the basics working.