Linux

No, no, none, no, learn vim.

I'd say avoid Wayland for now. There's no real benefit to it at the moment and at least your card works with X11. If the Linux Mint team are happy to wait and just test it out at the moment, that tells me that is the way to go.

Not sure what bloat people mentioned but Linux doesn't have bloat. The distro chooses their preferred apps which they hope everyone will like but it's easy to remove them if you don't and use the app you want. If it's a system app (.deb, rpm etc) it will barely take up any space anyway. Only flatpaks and snaps take up huge amount of space. I wouldn't recommend using alot of those as you'll be pressed for disk space

Linux doesn't require maintenance. It typically just works. It's not like Windows where you run a cleaner every so often. Just just use it normally and don't work about it.

What I wish I knew at the start: Linux Mint is the best distro. I wasted a lot of time distro hopping only to realise I just want a stable distro that gets out of the way but is thoughtfully put together with nice touches. Mint is that. I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I don't like canonical.

It's been rock solid except for when the kernel broke my WiFi, but I had a time shift backup so in 5 minutes I had my pre-update system back and working.

Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?

What is bloat. If I recall correctly fedora or RHEL (or both) enable the cups daemon even if you will not print anything. If I recall correctly Ubuntu enable openvpn service even you will never use it.

But it seems neither of them have tmux installed by default.

Feel free to test and correct me because I won't bother those distro anymore.

Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?

arch wiki is a tutorial.

Manual pages are best, and if GNU hells put the documentation in info pages, you can install info.

If the manual page is unreadable and the program is part of the base system (on BSD all 3rd party "packages" are installed on /usr/local and base system is installed on / and /usr), try reading the BSD (OpenBSD) maintained documentation. They are also provided on-line.

What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?

The first is to drop all the things you learned in Windows. Many have no value, many are flawed and create bad habits, many are disposed.

New linux user often prefer GUI or menu instead of command line tool (what I mean is different, see the next sentence). They prefer to browser chromium and chat and typing this comment instead of taking time reading manual page, books, learn how to maintenance their system, even you need to learn how to INSTALL YOUR SYSTEM CORRECTLY!! You use 'a' huge a partition (sorry, root / partition) with an EFI partition and a /boot partition (and perhaps a /home partition too, and that's the end?). No /usr, no /usr/local (this hierarchy is not used in Linux so keep it small), no /var, neither the /opt hell?

To keep your system organized and manageable, you first need KNOWLEDGE.

What to learn:

install and maintenance the system: partitioning, use your package manager (I hope you won't read websites that have to teach you to use your package manager but the main topic is to use some software). Example: Absolute FreeBSD; Absolute OpenBSD (Michael W Lucas, although this is for FreeBSD and OpenBSD).

Learn not to wine (don't run windows software on other operating system since it will need much kernel modification, OpenBSD explicitly refuse to do; I think running windows software on linux is unstable and insecure; I'm hostile with wine.)

UNIX programming: The UNIX programming environment; select some (like sed, awk) in the UNIX 7th edition manual pages, volume 2 which are tutorials that are still valid these day; manual page.

useful addition: get on tmux,

Enough for a regular user?

my personal habit:

I think I'm so lucky that I never do neofetch; once tried to decorate LXQt with the arc theme and then never used LXQt (since I switched to sway), if decorating the graphical interface make no sense to convenience I wouldn't do (I myself hostile with unixporn or something like that, mean I never care about such community) and never created a colorful github's myname/myname repo readme. (of course at the time I didn't do learning since I'm chatting and being an discord terrorist)

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?

I wish I could know what books to read

But when I know it's too late (wasted 2 year using linux and learned almost nothing), and I have already switched to BSD. "Gần mực thì đen, gần đèn thì sáng." (Near the ink you get darker, near the light you get brighter, that's my poor translation.)

Using NVIDIA please use the image from ublue.it, the official Fedora one can work but noveau is not ready. You can install Kinoite from Fedora though and give it a try, report your experience with noveau (should work and proprietary drivers are pretty scary) and then rebase to ublue (unsigned, reboot, signed, reboot)

Wayland is worth it, Plasma 6 will come out soon and primarily target it. It just works for me, always, I have like no problem with it. Flathub flatpaks always worked because they have loose permissions.

Xorg is an insecure mess and it is not maintained.

Also, give the Plasma 6 preview a try! and report bugs. Its like 99% ready.

Bloat: yes of course. Fedora Kinoite has none. If you install a few flatpaks, dont be scared by duplicate Libraries, they use deduplication to actually need less space.

Bloat matters as a huge LUKS drive is notably slower, but only a matter of seconds on an NVME/ any SSD. And yeah, please use LUKS, encrypting afterwards is not easy. Also use a Password that can be written in US QWERTY too, a bug in current Fedora Atomic, it doesnt use your native keyboard layout. Seems to be fixed on 40 (rawhide, Plasma 6 prerelease Version of Kinoite)

Habits:

• install huge apps like RStudio, an IDE, a programming environment etc. in a Distrobox. If you program hardware it needs to be a root distrobox, otherwise no USB access.
• if you git clone stuff, create a "Git" folder in your home, put that there. Guides never mention that.
• if you use Appimages, compiled apps, binaries; create a "Programs" folder in your home
• use Czkawka to find duplicate files

Resources:

• alternativeto.net
• itsfoss.com
• discussion.fedoraproject.org
• discuss.kde.org

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?

• Fedora Kinoite (Ubuntu broke, stable Distros suck, ...)
• use Flathub Flatpaks, they are often better

If you’re going to use nvidia, don’t even touch wayland. Truly an awful experience.

Bloat does matter it is extremely important, not because having a bunch of apps slows anything down or has any tangible impact in that regard. Because it isn’t as sexy as somebody’s hyper specific gentoo install compiled without some specific module.

The reason bloat is such a big deal, particularly if you’re new to it, is because it’s confusing. if you’re trying to fix a problem that you have run into / possibly contributed to, a dozen different programs running in the background that you didn’t put there is going leave you frustrated and disenfranchised.

Pick a modular distribution like Arch, take the loss that is your weekend putting it together and develop an understanding of how the pieces fit together. If you really don’t have time choose something like eg endeavourOS. ( or even Void is quite nice (but non systemd so less conventional))

I would personally recommend avoiding something like fedora or Debian. They are both fantastic distributions that work very well. They are not good at teaching new users how to fix problems and that should be your primary goal here.

I've been running kinoite on my laptop for a short while now, and I wanted to address a few miscellaneous things.

First: I recommend trying the out of the box experience for a while before going far customizing it. For example, someone mentioned your filesystem layout with subvolumes: that's the default in kinoite: home, var, and root are in subvolumes.

Second: Wayland either is or is about to be the default in fedora (I'm running the beta for the next version, and it's Wayland by default). Try it and see if you have issues before trying to switch to x11.

Flatpak is your first stop for installing software on kinoite, but the fedora repo that's configured by default is missing a lot. If shows software available that you don't see in discover/flatpak, you need to add the flathub repo, which is easy to do, but not obvious (to me) that it wasn't the default.

Finally, Nvidia experience might not be good ootb. You might need to take extra steps to get the proprietary Nvidia driver.

Good luck with your endeavor!

Edit: Firefox

I don't understand why the default install of Firefox isn't the flatpak version. Switch to the flatpak version and you won't have to worry about codecs.

Lol, I just noticed that this thread is 3 weeks old... How is your setup working out?

Don't listen to the trolls please, you have to think long term, how will you grow in the next 2 to 5 (or even 10) years, because without a doubt you will grow and have a learning curve which alters the way you will use your machine. There are tons and tons of solutions and people pitching it from their Linux ricer power user perspective.

Don't make yourself regret and/or spent countless hours switching back and forth, solving issues, looking through help articles, etc etc

I know it's hard but trust me, you literally cannot make a good choice now with your current state. Just install Ubuntu and get a hang of it, use it, do your stuff you want to do and when you are comfortable with Ubuntu, then throw that piece of junk in the trash and switch to Debian Stable - no, not SID, no you won't miss out on all the cool bleeding edge AUR packages.

When you take this path I described you will grow with the system and you will be able to make the decision based on your needs, wants and use cases. Trust me or suffer, I am sorry new guy.