Jesus fuckin' Christ.. FWIW Arch is my daily driver and all I had to do to use it was install programs I wanted (I'm familiar with the terminal so I prefer yay commands to a GUI, plus I like to consciously know what changes on my machine, and GUIs often come with recommendation advertising)

And things that I didn't do on Windows but is unique to my use case was:

• switch DE to one that can better support my specific desire of replicating Wallpaper Engine with Hidamari;
• Install openrazer-driver for (again) my specific desire of controlling my existing Razer hw with Polychromatic;
• Fiddle with xone and xpad-noone so my Xbox controllers work via their respective dongles;
• occasionally write .desktop files for the programs I wanted that only came as an .appimage
• shop around for my preferred libre Office suite

My experience with Ubuntu and Debian have been exactly the same