It's been perfect for me. The included Bazaar app store is very impressive compared to something like the apple app store. It reignited the lost joy of opening up the app store to find something new and interesting. A wonderful contrast to current meta of app stores just being a front to push expensive SaaS products, with platform operators taking their slice at gunpoint on the payment processing side.

It also includes a lot of development related packages by default, so you don't need to worry much about layering your basic tools with rpm-ostree. I generally found that most things I wanted as a developer and gamer were already installed or easily installed. The default KDE software is all good too. Perfectly functional utility software for viewing media, calculator, paint, remote desktop, text editor, filelight (so fast. way better than windirstat).

Flatpak is a treasure. With Flatseal you can view and manage application-system permissions with a level of granularity I have not seen in other systems. And most importantly Flatpak gives application developers a powerful common target to create a Linux bundle that will work on ~every~ distro. Downloading and installing my common apps like discord/.was extremely fast.

The singular deficiency I've seen is games that require anti-cheat. I'm not a heavy competitive gamer, so I simply do not play those games. I still keep a small windows partition around, should I fancy a game of league of legends, but I haven't booted it in at least two months. Last time I did all I could think was "holy shit. it really is this bad. it wasn't my imagination."

Nvidia drivers have been rapidly improving recently. HDR support in KDE 6.6 is really good. Better than windows actually. I have less HDR related problems on Linux now than I did on windows 11.

Old game compatibility is OUTSTANDING. On Windows I literally could not play CivCity: Rome with my ultrawide. With no windowed mode option, this 1280x1024 game was stretched across my entire screen and I couldn't stop it. On Linux the gamescope tool provides a custom isolated graphics context to any game you designate at your desired resolution/refresh rate. I can simply add "gamescope -W 1280 -H 1024 -r 60 -e -- %command%" to my steam properties for CivCity: Rome. And I get a properly sized window in borderless mode running at the correct frame rate for the game. Mouse jitters are fixed. Resolution size is fixed. Game runs perfectly.

As a longtime dabbler, the Linux ecosystem has made crazy progress in the last few years in bringing about the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop". For me, that year was 2026. At this point I don't see why I would ever go back.

Fedora + KDE feels like coming home to windows 7. Anything else, YMMV.

I've seen this behavior in my peers and in myself. Almost always among the addicts like myself you get two responses. "Yea no doubt lmao" or an exhaustive list of other addictions like television, cigarettes, Facebook, etc. trying to rationalize it to you and themselves. I'd like to point out in these cases it is far beyond a hobby. It is self-destructive. Going a day or more without eating or sleeping. Pulling an all-nighter because you just cant seem to get away from it. I've literally seen league of legends ruin a friends future because he couldn't study over getting in just-one-more-match. In my perspective video game addiction is an undeniable truth. And those vehemently opposed usually have a self-image interest in opposing it.