My best advice is:

Don’t listen too much about what strangers on the Internet say you should do or use.

Non of us has statistics to pull from. Mostly it’s individual experience mixed with personal preferences. All that could be different for someone else. E.g. some people will have problems with Nvidia, other with AMD.

Stick to the basic and add fancy stuff later on.

Don’t pick a distribution because of the Desktop environment. Or because someone said it has a nifty feature. People create new distros all the time just for fun and not because there would be a real reason for it. Looking on the release cycle would probably be the most basic decision you should take. Read about the differences between “rolling release” and “long time support” and decide base on you personal use case.

Have a backup strategy

This is nothing limited to Linux but since you are planing to switch your habits, there is a high possibility you will mess up at some point. Best would be you try to stimulate the worst case and look if you would be able to setup your system in a VM or something.

Don’t be afraid to try things out

Especially when you know that your backup is working. There is not much you can lose. Don’t be afraid of using Arch Linux e.g. just because someone on the Internet said it’s just for pros or something.

So this last one is maybe just the consequences of all the above. But yeah I guess that’s all I could say for now 😅

For your photo needs, you could try out RawTherapee and Darktable. They have builds for Windows and MacOS.

Well, moving to linux suggests you‘re trying to use it on your desktop, yet the post body suggests you‘re looking for a server.

These are two very distinct projects with vastly different difficulty and complexity levels.

I first made a homeserver for automation (homeassistant), streaming (plex), cloud (nextcloud) and some others. This was fairly straightforward and helped me learn the intricacies of the commandline from the ground up. I have no desktop environment on said server so I was forced to learn to ssh into it and my understanding grew quite fast.

After 2 yrs of this server running more or less without hickups (some minor mistakes made by me), I switched my desktop and lo and behold, it was quite a mess. Desktop linux is infinitely more complex than server linux and the amount of things that can (and probably will) go wrong multiply.

Hardwarewise, you can use the shittiest machine you can find for linux since windows is much more demanding. I even put lubuntu (bc lxqt) on a laptop from 2008 and its glorious! To get streaming in hd pr 4k you‘ll need a fairly strong machine with at least 4 cores and maybe 8-16 gbs of ram.

For the desktop, you‘d ideally go full amd to not have to deal with the mess that is nvidias closed source trashcan drivers. Your games will be all over the place if you play, either they run better, the same or worse than on windows, very few dont work at all, quite a few require tinkering.

But all in all, if you are willing to learn, you‘ll find a distro for yourself. I recently put pop os on a fairly new gaming laptop and it works very well. Mint is the more non gaming variant imo, ubuntu is great for switchers but quite controversial, for more control but also quite a lot more tinkering, you can go debian, arch or gentoo. The last two I consider absolute tinkerers distros. There are hundreds more but thats for later.

Good luck and feel free to update on your progress or ask follow up questions.

I don’t think you should proactively “switch to Linux”. Instead you should “play with Linux”, ideally duel boot and a day will come when you can’t remember the last time you used Windows.

I would advise you get Debian + GNOME and install all software via flatpack/flathub. This way you’ll have a very solid and stable system and all the latest software that can be installed, updated and removed without polluting your base system. The other option obviously is to with those hipster of a systems like pop, mint and x-ubuntu that are perpetually “half made” and fail often.

Now I’m gonna tell you what nobody talks about when moving to Linux:

1. The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;
2. I hope you don’t require “professional” software such as MS Office, Adobe Apps, Autodesk, NI Circuit Design and whatnot. The alternatives wont cut it if you require serious collaboration and virtualization, emulation (wine) may work but won’t be nice. Going for Linux kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays;
3. Proprietary/non-Linux apps provide good features, support and have tons of hours of dev time and continuous updates that the FOSS alternatives can’t just match.
4. Linux was the worst track ever of supporting old software, even worse than Apple;
5. Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “make it easy” to develop for those platforms and Linux is very bad at that. The major pieces of Linux are constantly and ever changing requiring large and frequent re-works of apps. There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode), userland API documentation, frameworks etc.;
6. The beautiful desktop you see online are bullshit with a very few exceptions. Most are just carefully designed screenshots but once you install the theme you’ll find out visual inconsistencies all over the place, missing icons and all kinds of crap that makes Microsoft look good;
7. Be ready to spend A LOT of time to make basic things work. Have coffee and alcohol (preferably strong) at your disposal all the time.

(Wine for all the greatness it delivers still sucks and it hurts because it’s true).

Linux supports a lot of hardware, the problem rise mostly on wireless cards. Thinkpads should be the most supported, other than linux first laptops. If you are building one, take a look at https://linux-hardware.org (where people uploads probes of their hardware). If you want to save you a headache, avoid nvidia. I never used it, but I’ve read a lot of issues related to it. Maybe someone else here can say more about it.

For distro choosing, nowaday almost all the biggest distros should be able to do anything. So the choose is about desktop environments (DE). Are you coming from Windows or from Mac?

If you are coming from Windows, then I would recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon DE, because:

• It is based on Debian (so it gets a lot of support)
• Windows like GUI
• Good default settings
• Flatpak preinstalled
• Good customization

If you are coming from Mac, then I would recommend Fedora Linux with Gnome DE, because:

• MacOS like GUI
• Good default settings
• Flatpak preinstalled
• Good customization (thru extensions)

But on Fedora you should install mesa and codecs from rpmfusion.

Remember: always prefer the software store to install apps.