Which distributions? I switched some of my machines due to the increasing user hostility in Windows, but found it a big pain in the ass, even as a developer. And that's not even considering how many programs/games will only work on Windows.
Give Manjaro a try. Not perfect but on all hardware I installed it ran flawlessly with all hardware detected out of the box with no need to install anything, either from a CD or online. Only single exception being a big network printer (Canon, IIRC) which in the end only required to go to openprinting.org, download the relevand ppd (just a few kbytes) and give it to Cups when configuring the new printer, which was already correctly detected btw.
As a Debian user (which I love but would not recommend to newbies) I've tried Ubuntu in the past but didn't like it at all; Manjaro in my opinion is the best one for moving away from Windows in the most painless way.
I am a big fan of Manjaro as a distro, but I would not recommend it to someone coming from Windows simply because things move fast and break - I've personally had proprietary software that worked at first, but later broke because libc had moved on. My solution (after trying plenty of workarounds) was to run it in an Ubuntu docker, but that upgrade cost me a lot of time and I don't expect somebody coming from Windows to put up with that much pain.
I also don't want to recommend Ubuntu (if I had to pick a single reason it would be snap), but from a problem-googleability-index point of view, it's hard to beat. Perhaps Mint, because it's mostly Ubuntu, but without snap (last I checked).
A lot if this will boil down to what you found to be a pain. I hate to "give you more work," but do you have a list of things that you found particularly difficult?
It's death by a thousand paper cuts. No problems are a real blocker for somebody who is good with tech, but it's still more effort that I'd like to spend. I'm willing to endure that because Microsoft has become too user hostile since Win10. But I don't see how a non technical person is supposed to deal with it.
I've had plenty of problems with Mint on my work laptop. For example:
* Regularly swapped itself into a screen freeze. Possibly because it defaulted the swap partition to 1 GB.
* Default boot partition was too small, so it ran out of space for new kernels. I have to manually remove kernels because the auto-remove is too slow to stay below the limit.
* Hibernate doesn't work out of the box. I managed to figure out that I have to install some other cryptically named package, otherwise `sudo pm-hibernate` fails without printing an error message. Then a distribution upgrade removed the required package from the repos. And that's just making the command line tool work, it doesn't add it to the power manager so it triggers automatically after an idle period or when closing the laptop lid.
I encountered similar issues on my gaming desktop running mint (e.g. the nvidia driver wouldn't load for no discernible reason) and steam deck.
Odd that you have partition woes, to me. That said, I have defaulted, for a long time, to not have fancy partition schemes. Where fancy is embarrassingly vague, of course; but the general idea is that extra partitions are largely solving problems from decades past. Worse, it leads to the swap and kernel space problems rather quickly. Though, swap into freezes is new to me.
Hibernate is one that I have heard a ton of troubles with. Largely with laptops. Good luck getting past it.
I am surprised you have had issues with the steam deck. That thing has been rock solid for me. Almost certainly my luck on the games I prefer.
Edit: I do want to underline my point about luck on my part. And good luck to you! I don't claim to have a panacea here. I also don't think it is some failing of anyone that some folks would stick with Windows or other.
I have for years used different flavors of Ubuntu and Arch, but must admit, I always had some issues, no matter the distro. Mind you, purely counting the problems, the amount was either comparable or slightly less than what I tended to encounter on Windows installs, but still, I get that adding any issues on top of less familiarity and lower software compatibility is a hard sell for the average person.
Then, I tried Fedora, more specifically Silverblue, for the first time in a while and was blown away. Everything worked. More to the point, I could not break the install even when actively trying to. Software was bleeding edge but stable, the kernel the most current version without issues, immutability prevents even the most idiotic mistake on the user's part, no update ever caused any issue. The concurrent rise of Proton and Bottles for Games made it even more appealing.
Then, something followed that would cement my reverence for Silverblue: At the time, I had recently gotten an AMD Renoir based laptop. Silverblue ran perfectly, GPU acceleration, sleep, connectivity, all out of the box as if the notebook had been designed for Fedora.
Still, I made a Windows install as a fallback. Unlike with Silverblue which, thanks to Kernel support for the GPU, needed no additional configuration, Windows of course required drivers from AMD. Upon installing them, I quickly noticed crashes, instability and resolution issues. Turned out, Windows update had overwritten the newest driver I had installed with an older, incompatible version. No problem, I thought, annoying and not something one should have to troubleshoot on a for-profit OS, but manageable. Used DDU to remove that, installed the current driver, again, overwritten by Windows Update. Repeated the process, this time manually blacklisting the specific update. Still, that got consistently and painfully reset every time there was an update.
I understand that not everyone believes in having full control over their system. I also understand that delivering drivers via Windows Update is a valuable tool for some people. But if those drivers are faulty, taking away any graphics acceleration and causing crashes and you take away my ability to address that issue by overwriting my changes, I have a hard time seeing my money well spent at Microsoft.
Since then, I have migrated away from Windows entirely. It helps that I prefer single player story driven experiences and rhythm games, both being well covered by Proton thanks to the general lack of AntiCheat.
Aside from my Fedora systems, I have a MBP, but Ventura has its pain points as well. Simply, nothing has ever been as rock solid as Fedora Silverblue and, as much as Red Hat is currently heading in the wrong direction[1], I have to give them credit for Silverblue and Fedora Workstation. Those continue to prove more stable than anything I have ever experienced with Windows, macOS or any other Linux distro, regardless of hardware.
Is the Fedora Project also going to follow Red Hat in the same bad direction? I thought for the most part that it is community maintained and the upstream version of RHEL.
You are correct that Fedora is mainly community driven and currently receives a large part of its funding from Red Hat. I could have phrased my initial post better, I am currently not concerned that their actions could negatively affect the long term success of Fedora (as I highly doubt they'd take contributors away from their own upstream), it was more about giving credit where it's due to an organization that I view critically overall.
