After being Linux exclusive on my personal laptop(s) for over a decade, I just went back to Windows + WSL 2.

With WSL 2, there's very little reason to use Linux desktop any more. The windows cleartype, touchpad driver and sleep work a lot better while giving you a regular Linux environment and you don't have to dual boot to get Office and creative software

> With WSL 2, there's very little reason to use Linux desktop any more.

My personal reasons to stick to Linux:

- my DE is fully keyboard-driven (Windows is mouse-centric to be point of being unusable to me)

- better support for complex networking (NAT, multiple route tables/VRFs/netnses, etc - just last week I had to run my entire network uplink through USB tethering, which was a breeze on Linux)

- system update when I want it, zero system-mandated reboots

- easy debuggability of software failures (Windows, when fails, is a black box and your only option to fix things is to enter black magic commands from random forum threads - without possibility of actually understanding what failed, looking at source code, etc)

- no feeling of always fighting against malicious, privacy-disrespecting software (it's not that I can't disable ads and tracking, but I really don't want to have to do that)

This thread is very timely, as I'm looking to switch from macOS to Linux, and I tried years ago, but was turned off by difficulties getting the keyboard setup the way I wanted it.

One of my favorite macOS applications is "ShortCat", which allows you to chord a shortcut (cmd-shift-space) and gives you a "GUI search" wherein any text that is on the screen (on any monitor) becomes selectable by typing it and choosing a selection...kind of like the way Vimium works in the browser, but for your multi-application context. I am comfortable with vim bindings generally but don't really care as long as there is consistency (pre-baked preferable, but configurable works). I've tried Linux years and years ago and my biggest gripe was that there was no unified "system" for handling setup of keyboard shortcuts / macros. "One system to rule them all" would be ideal, or at least "one system for each context layer, consistent between applications."

I am getting option paralysis since I know there will be a learning curve, and I don't want to spend a lot of time customizing just to find that the distro I picked is not going to meet my needs without a ton of deep customization. What Linux distro and/or window manager is going to get me multi-monitor HiDPI support with good keyboard-only navigation? From lurking HN i3 looks like it might be favored in my situation?

I want a workflow that allows me to easily jump from window-context to window-context, tab-to-tab, sub-window to sub-window, independent of monitor or applications.

I would consider something minimal like NixOS or Arch if someone could recommend a good playbook/setup for someone like me, and Manjaro and Pop_OS both look cool, but otherwise will probably default to Ubuntu for beginner google-fu.

I run both Manjaro on my laptop and PopOS on my workstation, and highly recommend both as great options to someone coming from MacOS like I did. PopOS on System76 hardware is very much like MacOS on Apple hardware in that things just work and you can get three years of great tech support. I've run Pop on other machines and it just works well. Manjaro is a blast because you always have the latest software and the installation is easy. While Ubuntu is perhaps an easy default, I can't really recommend 20.04 with the same enthusiasm as Pop 20.04 or the latest Manjaro release, as I have seen a lot of folks have problems. Try out PopOS - you really won't be disappointed, and will probably be delighted like I was.

But their tiling window manager extension is the real gem in my opinion. It's very clearly a v1.0, but I am still surprised by how much I enjoy it: https://github.com/pop-os/shell