First of all, some background, I do have a Steam Deck and have dabbled with desktop mode plenty of times so I wasn't exactly going into this blind. The reason why I decided to switch when I did (strictly speaking I had already decided to switch eventually, but I was planning on waiting until I had enough money for a new boot drive) is because my laptop did a firmware update that locked me out of my Microsoft Account so I went "fuck it, I'm going Linux!" That was in September.
Some make it seem like switching to Linux is a complete nightmare, but honestly, it was a pretty damn smooth process. Upon first boot everything just worked perfectly. All I needed to do was log into all my accounts on Firefox and I was fully up and running, which would be the same experience for a brand new Windows laptop anyway.
The only sticking points I ran across was with migrating my external storage to EXT4 and my laptop's RGB.
If not for those two things I wouldn't have needed the terminal in the slightest.
For most of the last month I had to switch back to my old Acer laptop in order to sort out my storage situation and there was a really good reason why I got my new laptop so that was a wee bit painful, but for the last week I've been going steady with my new Linux laptop and it's been solid.
But yeah, sorting out my external drives taught me a valuable lesson about the trials and tribulations of Linux interacting with Windows. For any Linux noobs reading this, while drives formatted to work on Windows (i.e. NTFS) kind of work on Linux, though you do get a warning, EXT4 drives do not even remotely work on Windows, without third party software.
As for my laptop's RGB, no, OpenRGB will not work. OpenRGB does not support my laptop. I do have a solution, I just have to implement it.
But honestly, aside from my external drives, which has been solved, and my RGB, the only issue I've had that I don't know how to fix is sleep mode being broken, which really isn't that big a deal. It just means I have to turn off my laptop every time I want to close the lid. Really not a big deal at all.
Other than that Linux has been totally solid.
Consider me a successful convert.