I've been getting fairly good battery life on arch and popOS on my laptop. Think it depends a bit on what laptop you've got as well. If I were to guess I'd say my current pop install gets ~10% less battery life than on windows, while I was probably even closer than that on arch after a bit of tinkering.

Imo it's been very easy. I recommend starting out by installing it on old hardware you don't care about anymore, or in a VM, just to get a feel for if it's something you feel is worth your time getting into, and if you want to keep using it, you can dual boot it along with windows. I particularly recommend PopOS as a great Linux distro to start out with, as it's a simpler and in most ways better fork of Ubuntu.

As it doesn't cost more than your time, and as long as tinkering with stuff like this is something you're at least somewhat interested in, I don't see any reason not to try it out again. But as with everything, there's no guarantee Linux is perfect for your use cases and you might be better off with windows, so don't feel bad for sticking with it if that's the case for whatever reason!

Worst part is that they actually started out kind of great, and killed all alternatives. Then they became progressively worse because of their predatory algorithms and whatnot, and now it's borderline impossible to get friends and family to switch to an alternative like mastodon or pixelfed...

That's understandable then, a lot has happened and the installation process in most distros is extremely user friendly and automated these days.

Like others have said, file sharing works pretty well with NTFS. I've had some issues playing games on steam that are on NTFS drives, but most work well. Also some issues accessing files from Cura for some reason. Other than that I have had no issues sharing files between w11 and Linux.

If you can, I recommend getting a dedicated SSD to install Linux on, and I'd recommend getting PopOS or Linux Mint as your distro. Both are Debian/Ubuntu derivatives, but are even easier and just overall better distros than Ubuntu imo, and most hardware and software will be compatible ootb without any tinkering.

I was fine with w10, but my god w11 has been a real pita for me. Had used Linux on laptops for quite some time before, but w11 was what finally pushed me into transitioning into Linux primarily on my main desktop PC as well.

Now this has me curious, what devices are those? Since transitioning to Linux I've installed it on a Mac, a surface pro 4, an old Lenovo laptop, an Asus laptop from 2014, my dedicated LAN desktop PC and my main desktop gaming PC, and none of those have had any issues.

I can highly recommend either using windows as a VM in virtualbox, or simply dual boot. I'm using Linux 99% of the time, but I still boot into windows occasionally for some firmware updates or software that does not work with Linux.

You can also test driving in direct sunlight without sunglasses or the suncover. You get notifications and beeping noises whenever the sun hits them directly, making the lane assist (I refuse to call it autopilot) quite irrational in most weather... It's actually worse for me than driving in cold weather.

Oh man, this looks so much easier than when I installed Lineage on the Poco F1! Might go for it now that I've got a pixel 7

Pop!_OS is another great alternative!

I mean, most countries are guilty of that right now, and I feel like a $200 fine for this is on the lower side (in comparison to other countries) of punishment.

I'd take 10h shreksophone over 3 of those 4 years worth of netflix content any day of the week!