Windows phones were really solid, OS was very user friendly and stable. I personally didn’t feel the “app gap” that a lot of others complained about but, I use my phone for browsing, calls & text. If I recall correctly it was also ahead of the curve with PWAs, integrated them really well. And price/performance was good on some models like the Lumia 650.
I use Olauncher, pretty similar to Niagara and is FOSS. https://github.com/tanujnotes/Olauncher
Just to be an absolute rebel; Solus
Chimera is the bees-knees. I’ve got my son’s computer configured with it and have had zero complaints, it just plays games and makes working roms/emulation so easy.
+1 for Nobara. All the optimizations make some significant differences in frametimes in my experience.
Nice, I’ve also thought of installing PFsense on it and using it as my home router. But that seems like kind of waste of its potential. It’s perfectly sized for that purpose though.
AMD, easily. Its literally plug and play. You can even pick some second hand options for cheap that are still solid for gaming such as the vega 56/64 and the RX 5700XT (which is I use). Intel isn’t bad so long as you’re not playing the newest stuff, my Arc a750 is solid in games like Fallout 4 and Elden Ring. Starfield is complete mess on it. Another thing with Intel is you’ll need a distro with a 6+ kernel to get the most out of it.
For me it was partially Windows 10 placing suggested apps and ads in the UI. The other part was just curiosity. After some distro hopping I landed on Mint, then Fedora and finally Arch where I’ve been for about two or three years.