Win10's issues and walled-in options are driving me nuts lately. I have a variety of software like Illustrator, Photoshop, Blender, Tidal the Office Suite and Solidworks that I use very frequently. I really can't not use those. I'd also like to play Steam games.

However, I'd like to use a non-bloated and stupid end user-only OS since win10's shenanigans are driving me mad, but I'm not super tech-savy either(though I'm learning).

Is it feasible to switch over to another OS that offers more freedom in the things I want, but still can run the above programs? If so, which? If not, how should I cope with win10?

What are some of the must-dos, must-installs, must-uninstalls, and must-alters of setting up a new PC? I'm getting my first new PC in 5 years on Sunday and the old one is really showing its age. I would like to avoid that as much as possible in order to keep the PC running smoothly as long as possible. I'd also like to optimize its performance and have useful software tools.

Thank you for any advice,
gbbb

I recently enabled controlled folder access in Windows 10. It restricts programs from modifying folders in a blacklist.

I have all of the music/pictures/videos/documents/desktop folders and folders containing backups added, is there anything else I should consider adding?

Or phone, or after an OS reinstall, etc. Just got to thinking about it because I did a fresh install of Arch on my chromebook the other day, and I'd be curious what other people's priority software installs are. For me, after the basics like drivers, it's xfce, Firefox, Transmission, Libreoffice, and VLC on linux. Pretty much the same on Windows, plus a few utilities like 7zip, PuTTY, and notepad++. For Android installs I grab nova launcher, Hangouts Dialer, F-Droid, NewPipe and MoonReader before anything else.

EDIT: Forgot firefox on android, as well as ublock origin on all platforms.

Also not completely sure if this belongs more in ~tech or ~comp.

Right now I dual boot windows 10 and fedora, windows for gaming, fedora for everything else. I'm considering running linux as my only native operating system, and running windows in a virtual machine for gaming. This will be more convenient than restarting my pc every time I want to play a game, and I'll feel better about having windows sandboxed in a VM than running natively on my computer.

To get gaming performance out of a virtual machine, I'm planning to have two gpus. One for linux to use, and one reserved exclusively for the virtual machine.

Have any of you set up a computer like this before? What was your experience like? How was the performance?

After trying windows 10 a few years ago and disabling all the marketing stuff and disabling other features that hinder performance, I've been curious why my only other real choice is linux, or reverting back to windows 7.

I feel that the mobile user interfaces has been developed and changed immensly compared to desktops, when it comes iOS and Android. While Windows has pushed some controversial but interesting features, macOS and Linux DEs has been kind of stagnant. Has desktop interfaces reached its peak form? Or is there more developments to come?