I’ve been using it as my main for months. Even as an Alpha, it’s very stable. That being said, it’s missing quite a few features that a lot of people would consider a requirement. So “ready” will heavily depend on your requirements

Definitely not just for handhelds. Check out Universal Blue images which are built ontop of Fedora Atomic (the immutable variant). Bazzite is an awesome gaming distro that’s rock solid. Bluefin is awesome for Devs and more technical people. But even for non-devs it’s awesome since the images are purpose build with and without all the devs tools. You pick your preferred DE (KDE or GNOME), and your graphics drivers.

Almost everything is setup for you that you would have to do mannually compared to Fedora Atomic, and additional quality of life tweaks are included as well.

Been running, Bazzite on my gaming rig for months now and it’s been great. Running the Cosmic/Gnome UBlue image on my framework laptop for months and its also been amazing.

I’ve had installations hang a long while before eventually succeeding. I would also ensure Windows has hibernate turned off and quick boot disabled.

This should add the flathub remote to the system and then install all the existing user packages into the system level. Then removes all the user level packages.

flatpak --system remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak --system install $(flatpak list --columns=application)
flatpak --user remove $(flatpak list --columns=application)

Personally I would just pick all the ones you’d like to be global (system level) and leave the rest at the user level.

Now that apple has their own silicon, all the older intel based MacBooks are pretty cheap. I just replaced my wife’s 2013 MacBook Airs battery, upgraded the drive, and installed Linux. It’s been a solid little laptop. Not the fastest but there’s probably a few pro models within your price range. Just make sure to get at least a 16gb model since the ram is soldered. Might have issues with the webcam, but the wifi drivers are pretty good.

Even though I don’t typically recommend an immutable distro to people with minimal Linux experience, as a dev and a gamer I’ve been pretty happy with the various uBlue images. Bluefin is a great out of the box image for devs and the uBlue images have a lot of compatability improvements over the Fedora ostree image their based off of. Bazzite is another good one specifically built for gaming.

My personal definition of “the year of the Linux desktop” is when we hit a market share % that starts to convince companies to take Linux support seriously. I don’t think we’re that far off from that happening and if Microsoft keeps adding in these terrible “features” to windows, more people will move over. Is 2024 the year for that? Probably not but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens before 2030.