Moving to linux (every 4 years as a test)

This is kinda a long post. Every 4 years it seems, when I want to re-install windows, I instead try Linux for a spin and see how far it's come for the "Big switchover" where I can live in linux permanantly instead of Windows (and if I need Windows, I can use a seperate machine or a VM).
I have other desktops, laptops, gaming devices and servers that I run Linux off of, but never my main desktop, with exception for VMs.
I do a lot on my desktop from image manipulation, consuming content online, editing video, DAW, but the biggest thing I do is gaming.

So here's my progress so far. I made sure that all of my backups were up-to-date on my external 8TB drive, as well as OneDrive and NAS. I pride myself on keeping backups, mainly because of my computer's silly configuration of having 2 RAID 0 NVMe drives. This was mainly done for conveniance instead of speed, and the instability didn't bother me because of afformentioned backups. This RAID would not fly, so I would need to create an LVM pool of both drives, then have both in a VG group so that way my root will live there instead of having to faff moving files between 2 seperate drives, so I removed my AMD RAID and installed under an LVM, where I would add the second drive in and expand as needed. I did this under Ubuntu Mate (because I felt oddly nostalgic for 8.04.1) and it worked perfectly. I set everything up, and the only thing that I ran into an issue with is how I have a stack of monitors, instead of side-by-side (atleast it feels like). I also felt desktop compositing was a bit simplistic than what I remember, and one thing lead to another to where I eventually installed KDE Plasma, which I had alot of driver issues with my GPU, so I then moved to Kubuntu 24.04.

After Ubuntu Mate, felt a bit more confident on setting up LVMs so I mapped my partitions manually. The biggest headache I ran into is both Kubuntu and KDE Plasma have issues finishing out an install when configuring for LVMs, but I got around it by setting up my partition maps beforehand and then telling the installer what partitions were to be used for what. After a few hours of toying around with this, I got it to work.
Now I'm running Kubuntu 24.04, which is great! The downside is that now I feel even less works consistantly.

• After some time (I believe after interacting with Steam) my mouse will refuse to click on anything. It'll move around, but just can't click. The desktop is responsive because I can press [SUPER] and call the app menu. I usually have to CTRL+ALT+F3 to reboot from the terminal.
• My DAC likes to disconnect for absolutely no reason, then come back on bootup. Yes this is a minor issue since I don't see it come back while I use my computer until my mouse stops working, but ya know.
• These, darn, panels! My main bottom screen works perfectly to where I can cover the bottom panel when a window is maximized, however the top refuses to cooperate with me. Whenever I move a window over the panel, it refuses to hide. Restarting never fixes this, and it can get in the way of whatever I'm looking at. Granted I can make the panel smaller, but I'm trying to replicate a dock and I like the large icons.

, just wanted to open the discussion on everyone's migration experience.