Arch Linux

Welcome! Coming from Windows myself, I made the jump to Manjaro (It has certain issues and I do not recommend it), then to Arch less than a year after. I have been on Arch full time for around 2 years now. After the initial setup, I have found Arch to be pretty low-maintenance and no harder to maintain than any other distro, hardly requiring more than the occasional yay -Syu --noconfirm in the command line to update things. As someone with less computer knowledge than an IT professional, I think Arch's reputation for being difficult is overblown IMO, and I suspect mostly due to intimidation from the more involved setup process prior to the availability of the install script.

I don't know if you have any familiarity with Linux already from your work, but regardless of what distro you go with, I would go into it with a mindset that you are learning a new skill. Some things are simply done differently in Linux than Windows and will require getting used to, such as how drives work using mounting points rather than drive letters.

Realistically, setting things up for the first time often requires additional steps and may not "just work," but when using my laptop and gaming desktop from day to day, it works just like any other OS. Gaming has been great for me generally, and the work Valve has done to improve game compatibility on Linux has been spectacular. Most Steam games do, in fact, "just work" for me.

In the 2-3 years I have been using Linux, I have rarely had things spontaneously break as many folks seem to worry about, or if I do it is because of companies not supporting their Linux communities, like Discord not pushing out updates on time, or major-event changes like the move to the Wayland graphical stack on KDE 6 which undid some of my desktop customization settings.