Yeah, dumbest thing I have seen in Lemmy up to now.

Just because anything is popular or widely used it doesn’t mean it is good or correct. Driving drunk with no seatbelt and with your underage children in the seat upfront was legal. Much like vaccines and seatbealts designs are free (as in open) because they were too good to be sold and would be unethical to do otherwise.

So if you think a computer is a simple machine and want to treat it as a screwdriver go ahead, most users are not smart to use computers anyway. Because of that most people do not even read what they are installing much less the messages they appear and then they ask why they get viruses or why their system does not work.

If you want something preinstalled then I would recommend something from system76 or Framework if you are in the US. And unless you are using the full MS Office suite with email heavily you can do all that with Libreoffice or OnlyOffice(On Archlinux there are clients for things like MS teams and stuff, there should be on other distros too).

I have a Lenovo Ideapad3 i3 iIntel processor and 8GB of RAM and play usually light indie games and it works fine with no excessive fan noise.

There is Steam OS which is obviously tailored for gaming so I guess that would be exactly what you need.

this was already posted earlier today

I love logseq!!!

Blanket is an app that plays relaxing sounds, not really a “must have” but it works great.

There is a solution that librewolf (Firefox Fork) provides in their wiki, it is xBrowserSync(add-on). I have not used it but I guess you can try it

Gnome for its looks, simplicity and intuitive ways, but after Plasma 6 release, KDE seems to be up par with Gnome’s UI/UX so at the moment Plasma ia my favourite desktop.

As for WMs I tried i3, Sway, and Hyprland. Overall Hyprland is my favourite because of its special workspace mechanics, customization and options. But if looks had no value to you and you like Sway’s scratchpad mechanic then sway is for you (plus its documentation is mostly clearer, better organized and well written than Hyprland). Btw I am not comparing their tiling because there are use cases for each person and you can acomplish each others tiling mode with plugins.

green ubuntu goes brrrr

Logseq, which is like Obsidian but FOSS.

My tip is not technical, I would say that you need to be honest with yourself and figure out what do you need, want and prefer because it is easy to get lost in the vast sea of options.
Take the time to ask what app/configuration would suit your need and feel free to ask for advice in something specific. Most often that not you will find someone that is like you and will share his experience saving you time, in any case there is a lot of learning involved. If you are the kind of person who read manuals and troubleshoots on their own it going to be easier. Otherwise be sure to pick a distro(if you are changing any time soon) that holds your hand.
Do not take opinions to hard, if it works for you… it works for you.
That said here is my take:

• If you do not plan to use the terminal at all then the most important decision you will take is your Desktop Environment. KDE will make you feel at home since you come from Windows.
• I suggest learning you distro’s package manager commands very well since you will be getting tons of new apps testing them and what not.
• There are universal packages called Flatpaks that should work on any distro, they are the easiest apps to install but I would suggest you use the corresponding package manager for optimized ighter packages for your distro.
• Music Players that people like.
• Look for a backup tool like Timeshift to revert from a bad update or a mistake you have done.
• Obsidian is one of the best note taking apps there and Logseq its it FOSS counterpart.
• Try to look for apps that are Wayland compatible because every major DE is switching from Xorg to Wayland, this way the switch will be easier.
• Do not run any command you found from a random website.

Well, good luck in your journey!