Ubuntu 12.04. I really tried to use it as a daily but wine wasn’t as good back then, a lot of apps I wanted to run were also platform specific. If a package wasn’t in your distros repo you had to try and build it from source which was really difficult for someone just trying to start with Linux. I tried again with Ubuntu 16.04 and it was better but still wasn’t quite there.

Fast forward to now and I’m actually dailying Bazzite 42. I’m not sure if wine has just improved a ton or proton has helped out a lot but windows compatibility has improved so much in the last decade. As much as everyone hates Electron for being heavier than native apps I would prefer an Electron app over no Linux version. Actually a lot of the apps I want to run now ship Linux versions so I don’t even need wine for most things.

Flatpaks and appimages with Gear Lever have made installing apps on Linux as easy as Windows and MacOS. It might not seem like it but it’s come a long way