I’ve been using it as my main for months. Even as an Alpha, it’s very stable. That being said, it’s missing quite a few features that a lot of people would consider a requirement. So “ready” will heavily depend on your requirements

I’ve had installations hang a long while before eventually succeeding. I would also ensure Windows has hibernate turned off and quick boot disabled.

This should add the flathub remote to the system and then install all the existing user packages into the system level. Then removes all the user level packages.

flatpak --system remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak --system install $(flatpak list --columns=application)
flatpak --user remove $(flatpak list --columns=application)

Personally I would just pick all the ones you’d like to be global (system level) and leave the rest at the user level.

Now that apple has their own silicon, all the older intel based MacBooks are pretty cheap. I just replaced my wife’s 2013 MacBook Airs battery, upgraded the drive, and installed Linux. It’s been a solid little laptop. Not the fastest but there’s probably a few pro models within your price range. Just make sure to get at least a 16gb model since the ram is soldered. Might have issues with the webcam, but the wifi drivers are pretty good.

Even though I don’t typically recommend an immutable distro to people with minimal Linux experience, as a dev and a gamer I’ve been pretty happy with the various uBlue images. Bluefin is a great out of the box image for devs and the uBlue images have a lot of compatability improvements over the Fedora ostree image their based off of. Bazzite is another good one specifically built for gaming.

My personal definition of “the year of the Linux desktop” is when we hit a market share % that starts to convince companies to take Linux support seriously. I don’t think we’re that far off from that happening and if Microsoft keeps adding in these terrible “features” to windows, more people will move over. Is 2024 the year for that? Probably not but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens before 2030.