At least you tried! And annoying that you stumbled upon hw issues.

If you ever want to try again what about getting hold of an old drive, or try dual boot, then you can swap back to windows easily and there's less pressure for Linux to work out of the box.

As you say the guides you used didn't match, try and research more about what is the correct distro for you, and maybe start with one that looks like a sure bet.

You still have Windows? Well there's your problem, you're supposed to format the entire drive when installing Linux..

Windows runs my laptop harder, uses more battery and the fans are spinning a lot of times whist it runs almost silent in Linux. I've settled on EndeavourOS which has given me a headache-free experience for my hardware (lenovo yoga pro 7 7840hs). Only keep widows for BIOS updates otherwise I'd have nuked that hodge podge of software melange.

If you're really set on windows you could try tiny11 to remove most of the bloat.

What distro did you use? and what gpu?

You're absolutely right that Linux is still missing a lot of the features that are available on Windows. But the freedom you get with it is so worth it for me, even if my 4090 is bored most of the time.

I'm in the same boat as you. I really wanted to switch. I had Ubuntu 20.04 installed on a partition from a previous attempt to convert. Installed all the software I needed, mapped my NAS, and then hit a huge roadblock when trying to connect my laser cutter.

Found plenty of support pages that all agree on possible issues related to either drivers or dial out access, but nothing worked. I researched and tried everything I found. So many USB drivers, a few different driver and package utilities and even drivers from repositories I came across on some Chinese websites that I had to translate and appeared to be related.

I got to a point that I thought a clean install might help. Uninstalled Ubuntu 20.04, installed Mint, tried everything again, uninstalled Mint, and finally installed Ubuntu 22.04. I spent 3 full days pushing back projects trying to communicate with my laser, but finally got to the point that I was going to miss deadlines if I didn't start running projects.

Booted up Windows and had no issues connecting and running. I was even able to drag in a second windows laptop that had never been used with the laser before, and it just worked immediately.

I wish I could make the jump from Windows.

I think most Linux users (including me) are just cheap and don't even have hdr. One of my two monitors has a dent in frame and has one DVI port and power. I think a lot of the maintainers are similar and therefore don't prioritise problems they don't have yet.

I think it's a real shame how bad the Nvidia experience can be but at this point I've found that if the drivers from the arch repos don't work nicely the flatpak ones usually will. Wayland is of course still a problem for now but hopefully not for long.

Half the reason why I bought an RTX GPU was for the video enhancement features like SDR to HDR conversion and AI upscaling

Neither of those things have anything to do with raytracing. Well the tensor cores used for denoising in RT workloads are suitable for all kinds of AI workloads and thus also upscaling, but really it hasn't got to do anything with raytracing. Or AI in particular any GPU can do convolutions.

I don't own an nvidia card and honestly few linux users do because their driver support sucks, I'd say if nvidia advertised those features and their linux drivers don't have them your complaints should be directed at nvidia. They won't care.

Meanwhile, mpv does inverse tone mapping natively. They don't integrate AI upscaling but there's various projects providing glsl shaders which mpv can use, here's the configs for Anime4K. There's also frame interpolation around somewhere but I haven't used it in ages because variable refresh rate is the best solution to odd frame rates.

Development of X halted, the few patches that are still landing concern xwayland, don't expect anything to happen there. KDE 6.0 ships with experimental HDR support on wayland, you might not need to wait five years go give a live USB stick a spin. Arch wiki has some pointers (not that I'd be recommending arch but I am recommending their wiki).

I mean, I literally can't. I barely used W10, I just flat out am unable to provide tech support, you might get lucky and I'll figure it out but that's the best I've got.

It's from a french tv documentary : https://youtu.be/Bk0iLlNTmVc?si=xptTU3Ay1cpeN2O4&t=3651

You're fine then. That's like beating yourself.

Try to format the USB, it will solve the issue.

Sounds like you didn't prepare the USB stick correctly. Just use Balena Etcher to do it.

I'm guessing it has legacy bios which then means you need a cd/floppy.