Decided to make the switch to Garuda instead of sticking it out on Windows 10 ESU or migrating to 11. This isn't my first time (I did the same to skip Vista way back), so I already have a general idea of what to expect!

That said, I've been very impressed how much things just work now. Proton existing as a de-facto Wine replacement makes so many things so much better. Wayland is much nicer than X11 ever was to me. Packages that include default installations for Steam, Discord, and Telegram are much nicer than having to manually enable proprietary packages then practically EULA away my soul on installing basics to my system.

The various flavors I've deployed to other machines here at the house (small servers and commodity boxes, roughly in Debian and Arch now in equal measure) also generally Just Work. This is so much better than writing awkward configuration files that were a scant prayer-riding-on-a-live-cd or shuffling through package dependency hell to keep my systems stable.

I have already run into limitations with the desktop setup (I need to kernel patch to get the Big Screen Beyond working, which thankfully I know how to do), but those have been few and far between.

I was prepared for pain and suffering to skip this cycle of Windows, so I'm... kinda shocked it all just works without a hitch? What the heck.