

I’d say Linux Mint, ZorinOS, and Manjaro Linux are all viable options for Windows users who want an easy transition. Although I don’t think any distro will ever be considered a “plug-and-play” experience. There are varying degrees of user-friendliness, but if one wants user-friendliness like not having to do root/sudo actions even once, I think one might be better off with MacOS…? Though from what I’ve heard, the main reason Windows users are looking towards Linux and not MacOS is exactly because of the ability to customize more than just the wallpaper (and also the entire boycott US movement).
The big one for me is
grep
/ripgrep
. I’m a dev, so there are often times I need to search the contents of files to figure out where something obscure is mentioned. This is also possible on Windows, but as with most things on Windows, it’s slow.The second mention-worthy thing is, oftentimes in conjunction with
grep
, is piping! It’s so enjoyable for me to find the files/content, pipe it to anything (sometimes throughxargs
and/ortee
), so that I can replace the text en-masse withsed
, remove all junk files that match a certain parameter withrm
, and generally automatically act upon something that I don’t have to manually look for.Although I’m a dev mainly on Windows, I’ve installed WSL as a compromise, and quite often find myself using its bash to perform tasks like the ones mentioned above.