That was always Gabe’s intention with SteamOS when it came out around a decade ago. He has never really liked windows, and definitely never liked the potential for Microsoft to mess with his product. SteamOS was made from the ground up to supplant windows as the primary gamer OS, we are just now witnessing the turning of the tide.
The media creator runs perfectly in wine. But isos are easy to find as well.
I use batch renaming all the time, very little of it for programming. Media management, and general file organization are my most common uses. But there are plenty of third party free programs that let windows do this without the need for running python scripts.
That was the first way I installed Ubuntu. I remember the bootleg ones on eBay for $5 also.
I use timeshift for local backups, then duplicati for backing up to Amazon glacier monthly.
Don’t forget that a local backup is as bad as no backup at all in the case of a fire or other disaster. Not trusting the cloud is fine (though strong encryption can make this very safe), but looking into some kind of off site backup is important. Could be as simple as a second hard drive that you swap out weekly stored in a safe deposit, or a nas at a trusted friends house.
I honestly wish more programs did the app by app theming thing like steam and discord. I don’t need my desktop theme applied to every program I open. I would much rather the program to have a consistent design language that works, rather than slapping themed buttons all over the place that don’t fit with other aspects of the program.
Originally, because I was a poor middle school student with a bunch of dumpster hardware. I could not afford a windows license (this was the XP days). I immediately liked Ubuntu (gnome 2 at the time) more than windows, everything felt faster and more customizable. It really screamed on my pentium 3. I used Linux of various flavors all the way through school and continue to use it as my OS of choice to this day. I remember my teachers always being mad that I didn’t use “times new Roman” font when I turned in papers, explaining that I used Linux and TNR was not an available font didn’t do much for me. I would switch to windows for AAA games back in the day, but that is quickly becoming less necessary.
The biggest benefit I have seen over the years is that it is so much easier to keep old hardware alive (and still secure) with Linux. If your old matching is starting to bog down you can always find a lighter weight distro to load it up with. And when you are ready to upgrade hardware the old stuff can easily be turned into a server, game console, or PC for grandma. Anything to keep it out of a landfill is pretty easy to do. It used to be that you never had to worry about paying for an upgrade either, but now that windows is essentially free for upgrades that is no longer a huge benefit.
Not sure if it’s right, but it seems to me this is really just a bunch of preconfigured fedora instances for specific use cases with containerized packages you can mix and match to your needs. Then they slap on a bunch of buzz words to make it sound novel.