Ah yes, it was g2222. Anyway, anyone can reply who knows the answer.

I do not believe (at least in the case of Arch) you can request an update to particular point in time.

My suggestion is prior to a significant update you fear might be a problem, do a back up with rsync or similar:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rsync#Full_system_backup

A restore is the exact same command with destination and source reversed.

But as long as you do a FULL system update you are not likely to have a problem.

On Arch you would run "sudo pacman -Syu"

Personally, I recommend starting with the more mainstream choices. In particular, I would recommend:
* For the distribution, if the computer is a few years old, debian stable is a good choice; it will almost never break on update. For newer computers, you might try Ubuntu or Fedora. I wouldn't stray too far from those mainstream choices. (In particular, I would advise avoiding Arch and Gentoo, at least until you know your way around Linux.)
* For the desktop environment, go with either Gnome or KDE.
* I would, for the most part, stick to the versions of software contained in the repository. If you need to install something not in the repository, don't install it system-wide, and don't do anything that requires sudo/root access when installing such software.

I have not used Debian in a long time. But my memory was that it was a hassle to install things a gamer would often want because of its repositories having such strict open source requirements.

I'm a 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' kinda guy.

Actually in the past more than once i completely upended an upgrade because it made the computer slower, so i took the older release. But this was Redhat 4 days...

. . .

For Arch, I was surprised to learn SteamOS (and Steam Deck etc.) is apparently based on that? Maybe that makes Arch or Manjaro a bit more lucrative and compatible as a gaming Linux distro?

Does that really matter in the big picture? I've used various different DEs on different Linuxes, and never have I really felt any of them really prevented me from doing something (especially in Linux where you quite often tend to just launch the "command prompt" window and do your stuff there).

I usually select XFCE because it feels almost like the familiar Windows 7 GUI, and demands little resources. Simple and clean, does what it is supposed to, nothing more, nothing less.

I used GNOME with Rocky Linux 9, and at first it felt a bit weird because it worked so differently from many other DEs (including XFCE), but after awhile I became accustomed to it as well, just had to learn do things a bit differently than in e.g. XFCE.

The only time I was a bit unhappy with a DE was with whatever comes with the Raspberry Pi OS, as that didn't have the ability to type in in the start menu what application you want (like you can in most Linux DEs as well as Windows), you had to search for it in the menus like in old Windows XP. That was indeed a bit too oldskool for me.

I'm the guy who likes to keep everything in one partition, both in Windows and Linux. Simpler and more efficient space usage that way, I think.

Yeah I understand why for e.g. release upgrades keeping a separate home directory partition might make sense, but meh, I rather just backup everything from the /home if I am in doubt.

On critical servers at work, yeah it makes sense to have e.g. a separate /data or /opt or whatever mountpoint so that the root filesystem doesn't run out of space accidentally, but that is less of an issue for home users.

I am dual booting right now, most likely will still need Windows for my tax program. However pretty much all the programs I use daily have Linux versions, or at the very least work with assistance from WINE/Proton.

Why NTFS? That file system isn't that well supported on Linux. In particular, if Windows shuts down uncleanly (or if you forget to disable the option that makes windows "shutdown" hibernate instead), it won't be possible to access that partition without booting into Windows.

These days, I'd probably recommend exFAT if you need such a partition. (The former recommendation was fat32, but that doesn't support large files or partitions.)

This advice is geared for new Linux users, who aren't yet familiar with the landscape and might be confused by too many choices.

If you're familiar enough with Linux enough to have an idea of what desktop environments there are and which ones work for you, then this advice is no longer applicable.

Ok, I just don't know why GNOME and KDE in particular are good (best?) choices for a newbie. For me, who is more familiar with Windows desktops (and Linux DEs which in many ways feel like Windows, like a start button behind which there are menus, desktop icons etc.; XFCE is like that), GNOME felt strange to me at least in Rocky Linux 9 as it wasn't quite like that, it felt different for the sake of being different, but usable after you learned it. Not sure if it is similar to e.g. Mac GUI or something, never really used a Mac.

My advice to Linux newbies would be: select the default desktop environment for the Linux distro that you are going to use because when you google for instructions that involve the GUI, they usually assume that is the DE you are using with that particular distro. (Most Linux instructions use shell so that they don't have to care what DE you are using, and it it simpler to just list needed commands, instead of instructing where to click in the menus etc.).

And, in some cases selecting a different DE where there is no prepared distro download for it means going through some extra hoops to change the DE for that non-default desktop environment. (For Mint there is a separate XFCE build so that is why I used it, instead of Cinnamon or KDE which have their own as well.)

That is why I used GNOME with Rocky Linux 9 even though I wasn't that familiar with it, as it was their supported default DE for it. Not because I felt GNOME is superior in some way to other DEs (in fact it wasn't, I recall there were some issues with e.g. desktop/font scaling which work better with many other DEs, in GNOME the scaling was restricted and/or caused blurry fonts etc. if you used it, some googling explained it was because of the old inefficient scaling method that GNOME used).

EDIT: I think it was about the (lack of) fractional scaling in GNOME, not sure what the status is now:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/11ekj8o/what_is_the_state_of_fractional_scaling_on_gnome/?rdt=60449

If after a little while with Zorin OS you decide you really like the packages system (dpkg/apt), you can use tools like game-data-packager and ./play.it to generate native packages for your games.

./play.it has a thread on GOG forums that I follow more or less regularly: ./play.it, weekly news (the title is a lie, I do not update it on a weekly basis).

. . .

One reason is that they are modern and significantly more popular. More people are going to be able to help with these than something more obscure.

KDE in particular is going to be very familiar in its interface to a Windows user. Gnome is not Windows-like. Its reduced customization and over simplified UI is more like an Apple product. No real desktop could be a rude shock for a Windows user too.

In my opinion FAT, exFAT and NTFS are all bad options for a data partition shared between Linux and Windows. An open standard like UDF would be a much better solution.