Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward

Just recently moved onto Linux. Most likely not coming back when these kind of things just keep happening. I'm really surprised how well everything works. 120Hz HDR 4k Nvidia no issues on Wayland. Kubuntu 25.04/Plasma 6.3 is very nice. EasyEffects/PipeWire makes audio better compared to Windows. Steam/Proton/Wine works very well for games outside ones that have kernel level rootkits. Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth I can't think of anything that's worse than Windows while many things are better.

Meanwhile, I just tried 3 different flavors of Fedora last week and could not even get to the point where I could log in reliably. Never mind getting the handful of Windows-only apps I still rely on to work. I'm despairing that I may have to let Windows update itself to Win11 while I wait for my next hardware upgrade cycle to roll around so I can try to pick more compatible hardware.

If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick desktop components that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.

I wonder what issues you've seen (error messages), and what hardware you're using. Fedora has been my goto distribution for more than 15 years. And aside from Nvidia, and Gnome, causing me trouble, it worked great[1]. Though I always install the Xfce spin.

For your Windows applications you can try to use winapps (windows vm behind the scenes, but tucked away from view) https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

[1] never update to the latest Fedora version, at least until a couple of months after release. If you don't want to be a beta tester. Yes sometimes they don't a good job with SELinux policies and you'll be dealing with annoying popup notifications from time to time. And yes, if you're using full disk encryption (via LUKS) you really want to enable some flags which Cloudflare engineering contributed back (but are not the defaults), otherwise stuttery desktop behaviour is possible.

I don't think I ever saw an actual error message, just a lot of black screens in various configurations (e.g. switching KVM between machines, waking up from sleep) and lots of weird little glitches in Wayland. I know that my Nvidia 3090 needs to be swapped for an AMD GPU, but I'm not totally convinced that that will solve everything. Particularly the black screen on wake from sleep seems like it could/should be a mobo issue.