I like thunar with Arc theme but it’s Gtk based, and you really need to install thunar and its plugins (volman, archive manager, etc)

Pros:

• Better UX for system. On Windows and Mac you’re stuck with the old-style window movement desktops which suck and are chaos with lots of effort to maintain when trying to do anything productive. Even with third-party tools it’s nothing like being able to have something like Niri. It’s just better on the Linux world.
• It actually meets your needs instead of making your change your needs. The customization is insane, but usually you don’t even have to go very far to be happy.
• No bloat, no forced features like AI (tho you can get your own AI stuff if you want), less privacy concerns, better tools generally

Microsoft Windows is actually a complete piece of crap

Unfortunately, cons of switching:

• Have to use non-standard apps for certain things like office files or DAWs for audio production
  • Tho, these are less bad these days. In fact, some are better like I’ll take Blender over Maya any day, and I use OnlyOffice even on Windows, bc why pay for the “Copilot App” (formerly MS Office) when OnlyOffice is just as good and is fully compatible?
• Some games don’t work (esp multiplayer), and sometimes for no good reason other than the devs don’t like Linux users, e.g. Bungie.
  • Also far better than it used to be. Very few things I miss out on
• MacOS clearly has the better app distribution system. A single folder with all necessary deps save a couple core libraries. Simple, effective, can still be put in a store. Instead we have an obsession with sandboxing or overcomplicated packages. AppImages were so close to being right. But nope. We can’t have nice things sometimes

I’ve been using Linux-only since around 2019 (having used it alongside Windows for gaming before then) when Proton finally started getting good. I’m also an engineer, artist, writer, gamer, musician, maker, and more, so I feel like I have touched a lot of the different ways in which computers are used. I’ve used several distros for extended periods, and my fav is Arch (tho Nix is a close second; it’s just not quite ready for primetime)

Linux is absolutely a viable alternative, but you have to know what you want from your PC. How do you want it to function? Pick that choice. It’s not ice-cream flavors where all are equal and you have to decide; form follows function here. Decide what you need and then build your own system from that - bc Linux is yours. Refuse to be spoonfed slop no matter if the slop is from Microsoft or from a Linux distro. Slop is slop. Cook your own meal. It tastes better. If you don’t like mushrooms, don’t get mushrooms.

You still need X11 or Wayland somehow. I would suggest something that can run in “kiosk” mode. That’s essentially what you want - boot a single app and run that.

If you don’t care about wayland, just install xorg-xinit (since you said Arch) and put this in ~/.xinitrc: exec steam -bigpicture

Run startx to launch it on its own. There may be other dependencies you need for steam or for games, but you don’t need a whole DE.

If you want, you can even enable auto-login and then set up auto-start by adding this to your ~/.bashrc (or whatever shell you use):

if [[ -z $DISPLAY ]]; then
  startx
fi

I’d recommend using something like Niri instead of mutter for the compositor as Niri is:

• Extremely customizable
• Meant to be used alone (unlike mutter which is for Gnome)
• Supportive of Wayland portals better than any compositor I’ve tried
• Very modern
• Pretty stable
• Making use of scrolling window management which is, imo, superior to anything else
  • You could force all windows to be floating if you want that traditional method tho

I’d also recommend using DankMaterialShell and simply providing a theming to get the appeal you want. It works well with Niri and provides all the system tools you need for an OS like bluetooth and audio management, application lookup, etc. It’s sort of a stripped down Gnome-shell for standalone compositors but way more customizable.

Then everything else can just be installed WINE apps.

Absolutely unusable for one big reason: still no good tiling options in KDE. They got me hopeful with their tiled area system but then dropped the ball on execution. An OS without tiling is functionally unusable for real work. There aren’t even any good KWin scripts for it. At least Windows has stuff like FancyWM. Will not be using any time soon. GNOME, with the ability to install Pop Shell 2, is by far the superior DE, and it’s not even close, and I’ll stick to that for most things and a WM/compositor (in this case Hyprland) on my main machine. KDE is and will continue to be trash until they can add true tiling support. Might as well some 1980s looking WM like OpenBox. That’s what KDE is. Old and unusable. Nothing else they “improve” matters since the core of operations doesn’t function.