For my main workstation and main laptop:

• Cosmic themed GNOME - I just like the way it looks and works without any changes. The basic tiling functions are something I find helpful at times too.
• Plasma 6 - It works pretty well and looks nice. I don’t do a lot of customization, so it’s not a big deal to me. For my other machines I’m currently using Cinnamon, GNOME, Budgie, and LXDE.

https://blissos.org/ is another one I just remembered as well.

https://www.android-x86.org/

You can (at least the last time I ran an install) get both 10 and 11 installed without a Microsoft account, 11 just requires this process to do it. If you have an old ISO of 11 around it should allow a local account if you don’t connect to the internet, but they apparently patched that out now.

Yep, I didn’t convert either of my accounts over as well.

I would just try it and see what you think of it! It’s completely free. Minetest is the program you install on your computer, and then there are lots of different games that you can download and try inside of Minetest. There’s more besides Minecraft-likes that you can try, and there are definitely mods available. I never modded Minecraft though, so I’m not sure how they compare.

As to system requirements, it could run pretty well on a six year old Android phone the last I tried. It might be worth a shot on your laptop! Be aware that it’ll probably be a somewhat different experience than Minecraft, but not necessarily in a bad way!

Yes, it often is!

Exactly! Better all around for me. The player base isn’t as big, but I’m not really an online player.

Yes, it’s certainly changed for the worse since I’ve played it. I quit fairly soon after they announced that I would need to eventually migrate to a Microsoft account. Seeing some of the things they’ve done since then doesn’t make me miss it!

I haven’t had the urge to play it recently, so I haven’t tried it since the name change. I heard they were diverging a bit from being a Minecraft clone, are there many large changes?

I primarily prefer it because it does pretty much all the Minecraft stuff I want it to do, and it’s got other games available as well. Plus, completely Linux compatible and no Microsoft account!

What pushed me over the edge was how much worse the user experience became with 8 & 10.

I really disliked the lack of control over updates, settings and defaults being reverted after minor updates, and the constant pushing of Microsoft accounts and services. The data collection and privacy issues certainly didn’t help either. I switched from 7 to 10 for a period of time, but eventually started using Linux for everything except for games. I started realizing just how good Linux gaming was getting, and I eventually had one too many issues with my Windows partition and just quit using it entirely.

I don’t remember having a lot of the frustrations I hear some talk about when switching, but I think that was because early on I realized I just needed to start figuring out the Linux way of doing things rather than bringing my Windows experience over.

It still works for installing the OS though, at least in the case of Nix. I’ve not tried Guix so far, but I’ve installed NixOS on two machines in the past year using Ventoy.

Check out Ventoy! Unless you need a single ISO on the drive, it’s just something you install to it and then copy and paste ISOs to the folder on it. No flashing needed, it runs them for you. I’ve got 128GB drives almost filled with every ISO I could possibly want.