itch.io

For a lot of the general stuff, there’s good enough alternatives (or sometimes the best thing already is multiplatform, like coding IDEs). So I’d check those things to know if there are any deal breakers. Say, maybe you want to use some specific DAW you can’t get working. But, largely, it’s fine. If you use desktop office, there’s Libre Office, if you need Photoshop there’s GIMP and Krita, if you edit videos, there’s kdenlive… but it CAN be a sticking point

For gaming, things have come a LONG LONG way with Wine. Some titles CAN be a bit of a headache, but usually you’ll find what you need to sort out in protondb or something like that. That’s becoming rarer and rarer, though

As for Linux encouraging you to code… maybe in a way? it’s one of the things that’s WAY WAY better to do in Linux as opposed to Windows where none of the tools actually work properly. But day to day you won’t need to do much, if any. Maybe a shell script here and there to make something easier but for most distros these days, you don’t really need to be getting under the hood (even if it can be fun)

A lot of the fun in Linux is exploring and finding your comfort zone. If you don’t like something that Apple or MS did with their OS, screw you. But in Linux there’s a lot of distros with different ideas and goals (PopOS wants to be easy for gaming people, OpenSUSE wants to be stable and friendly, ClearLinux wants to be the fastest, Debian and Rocky want to be the basis for servers, Arch wants to be flexible and malleable…) as well as a lot of different desktop environments so while it can be a hassle to distro-hop, some exploration can be very valuable. If you’re not feeling what you’re on and don’t have a lot of setup already in place, might be worth checking other stuff out. I myself use Arch but the install of this distro is really rough if you’re not used to Linux already, and though it’s easy to work with, you do need to do a lot of things yourself, so not something I’d recommend to someone just getting into the space. Arch Wiki is a fantastic place to check for any Linux thing you want to know, though, well worth keeping in mind