GooeyGlob

Yeah I’ve felt that way for a long time. It’s done all that I need and more since about 2003.

Yes you’ll fuck things up. Don’t keep anything remotely important on it and screw around with it. That’s how you learn. Blow your install away intentionally, try a different distribution the next time. There’s a lot more variability between distros, and more customizability compared to Windows too.

If you want to learn something new and different anyway. It’s definitely not like Windows except at the most surface level; you can get by in the GUI for almost everything until something goes wrong, but that’s exactly when you want to have been learning cmdline stuff, so you can try to salvage it.

I was looking for a smaller (14" and not bulky) gaming Laptop, and ended up with the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X. And I’m very happy with it; feels fairly future proof with 32GB of Ram and runs NixOS like a champ.

Only has a GTX 3050 though, so it’s not for the highest end gaming, but that’s never been my priority anyway, it runs BG3 quite well and that’s the beefiest thing I’ve thrown at it.

As mentioned, Minisforum and Beelink make great APU-based Ryzen systems which are going to give a great bang-for-buck. Get them from Amazon vs their dedicated website as some folks have had shipping delqys with the OEM website. ETA Prime does great reviews on YouTube of these boxes and shows what the FPS is like on some current, a few years old, and retro games for each one.

If you want the smallest possible system, with room for one the smaller form factor discrete graphics cards I’d say the NUC 9 Extreme works very well. I have a GTX 1650 in it and it is perfectly fine.

Steam Deck with a usb c dock is also a great option.