I did not, but of course you can. Either by using an adapter (maybe a printable one?), or – if it is an SSD – by just placing the drive there and hld it in place with one screw.
If there already is a drive installed you want to removed and there is no spare cover, you can also print one.
(You can of course buy the parts instead of printing them. Those adapters and covers are fully standardized and widely available.)
You summarize it quite well. But I would still recommend Arch (but as an Arch user since 2008 I am biased on this). Why?
Lightweight, ideal for gaming. My full-featured Wayland-setup with labwc runs with ca. 2 gigabytes of RAM, including Firefox, which on it’s own currently takes up 800 megabytes. Not that RAM would be an actual issue on modern gaming setups, but still, this shows how little resources the system needs for itself.
Gaming on Linux is pretty much solved nowadays thanks to Valve (Steam, Proton, etc.) and Flatpaks. Games that do not work are intentionally made to not work on other platforms than Windows due the games using ring0 spyware as DRM and for anti-cheat.
Privacy by concept – while there are no specific measures taken regarding privacy, the default installation just does nothing except initializing the hardware and allowing the user to sign in. Everything else is up to you.
Software development is – like gaming – a no-brainer. All common tools work on Linux. Even more: Dependency handling, setting up the environment, using different compilers – all this feels much smoother than on Windows.
Maintainability is great. Since there are no package changes from upstream, you can be sure that bugs are typically bugs in the software and not coming from Arch packaging.Thanks to rolling release you get much less updates at the same time compared to fixed release distribution – ganted you update regularly. I check the news and update every 1-2 weeks at the weekend.
And since you’re coming from Windows, you have to learn new stuff anyways. So why not dive head first into Arch?
but setting up without it should be more straightforward.
I tried with Lua. I installed the language server and followed the instructions and fiddled with it until it worked, doing multiple web researches over a time of 40-60 Minutes.
All I got was a bunch of W for lines where I used global variables, and some underlined text with “no information available” and a table variable showing what keys the table has.
No autocomplete, no information on parameters, no nothing.
This is not good or convenient at all and we should stop lying to ourselves. LSP in Neovim is utterly annoying and complicated to set up properly.
Installing from the repos I have pacman, from the AUR I can use one of the various AUR helpers (most of them can forward repo package updates to pacman, so I really have just one command to update the system and all AUR packages).
When making my own packages I usually also put them in the AUR (plus, it is super easy to do make an own package and put in in the AUR) – and from there an aUR helper takes care about updates. Flatpaks can also be updated very easy by just running one command.
So: All of those have a specific location where they install and allow me to start them easily because they put a script/link somewhere in $PATH. All of those can be easily maintained and updated.
Last time I checked, AppImages had none of those. Neither could I easily update all of them on my system, nor is there a dedicated location to place them, nor is there an “unified” (i.e. something in $PATH) way of starting them. I have to manually check for updates, re-download the whole thing, replace the current AppImage file in an arbitrary location.
This is just how I do not want to maintain my programs.
They want you to use their partnered sites instead of adding your own.