Actual Engineering
Granted, I don't use much Windows centric software, so the switch was rather fine. Hardware issues, on the other hand, were quite awful to deal with. I don't have a very obscure laptop but some chipsets, namely the network and audio, were known to have funny linux drivers. The Arch Wiki is a great resource,
Arch Linux has a somewhat new install script called archinstall that aims to automate the Installation Guide on the Arch Wiki. The guide is well written and necessarily comprehensive, but to be honest I couldn't be bothered with filesystem setup and locale and stuff. My installation is probably a security time bomb, whatever.
I'm not going to go over the installation details, since that's something the wiki and forums should be doing. The setup was not completely smooth but my linux system is much nicer to use than my windows one. Nice having it use 2GB of memory with KDE instead of the 5GB RAM on windows.
Some software I do miss are windows specific only. Namely productivity tools like text editors, file managers.
Losing Visual Studio was painful, losing all those muscle memory and shortcuts. Visual Studio Code does exist on linux and I did use it for a while when I was still figuring out how to operate Emacs.
Emacs is a very good editor. Undisputably the best text editor known to man (however I've never tried vim, so maybe I'm missing out on never seen before text editing performance). I'm using Doom Emacs, which is a distribution of Emacs with a lot pre installed and managed and configuration simplified to some extent.
People weren't joking when they said it could replace your OS. Configuring it does require you eventually learning LISP and it's very functional syntax. In the end, it's quite nice having a program that does both full blown IDE functionality and simple markdown editing. It has a LISP REPL, Language Server Protocol (LSP) support for any project or language, a terminal emulator, a therapist, a git client, a weird web browser, a file manager, a weird email client, multiple window splitting, spellchecking (with some system installation), and can restore any session, no matter what you had running. Good luck making Visual Studio do all of that. Without a mouse pointer!
Granted, most of these features could be unnecessary for most normal people using linux, but what's nice is that they're available but not loaded unless called for the first time. Emacs itself is very fast and lean, so even if you launch any of these there won't be any delay.
The shortcuts are quite different from what normal people are used to. They're based on combining modifiers and keys until you reach the function you want to execute. Discovering them isn't the easiest, but I bet whatever obscure text edit you want to do can be done in 5 keystrokes or less. The terminology does require learning. And the 'emacs pinky' is not a myth, so beware of that.
Everything by Void Tools is a fast file searching tool. I still haven't found anything as awesome as it for linux. There's GNU find but that thing's absolutely horrible. Completely unusable and slow. There's the amazing ripgrep that by default searches within files. For just filenames, I instead use ripgrep to list all files then pipe that to ripgrep again with my regex. Not an ideal solution but it does work. Getting used to regex syntax instead of glob syntax took me a while too.
pdfgrep is another option, though I don't quite like it as much. It works and has pretty output, but is way too slow.
Steam officially works on arch, can't be bothered to install it. Never had to try WINE yet, but it does have a good reputation. I only play zero-k and sometimes minecraft, but I've been trying to limit my gaming anyways. Too busy for that.
Microsoft office is too good to pass up, I use the university's cloud virtual machine to access Office tools sometimes. Either that, or I boot actual Windows and deal with the insane loading time and abysmal battery life.
Fonts are nice until you have non-latin filenames appear on your system. Turns out the defaults aren't quite sane and the rendering is funny looking.
Turn of fast boot, both in bios and in windows. Also windows is not a good citizen and doesn't properly shut down hardware when rebooting, so always shutdown from windows and power on instead of choosing 'Reboot'. Not that I boot too much into Windows nowadays anymore.
This one was very difficult to handle. I can't remember exactly how I resolved it, but I do remember the install script installing two networking daemons that would conflict on shutdown. I think it was iwlwifi and systemd-networkd.