What do you use iTunes for? That stood out to me.

Also Chrome works fine on Linux, though Firefox is a better browser even on Windows.

Antivirus is completely unnecessary and terrible on windows and linux... and on linux it's uniquely useless. Everything is installed from a centralized repo, antiviruses won't be of any help at all. antiviruses came about because windows let executables just be run easily and simply and used them as the default way of installing software, this was beyond idiotic and the reason that OS became infested with malware. Linux never made that mistake from the start, and so antivirus is unnecessary.

Norton is basically just malware, however.

1. emacs

2. emacs

3. emacs

4. emacs

5. emacs

6. emacs

7. emacs

8. emacs

9. vim

10. emacs

11. emacs

12. emacs

13. emacs

14. emacs

15. emacs

AMD DRIVERS - Linux's built in drivers

Chrome - Chrome

gmail - gmail

Office 360 - Office 360 (web)

Norton - You don't need such piece of adware in Linux

Py-charm - py-charm

Star citizen - Star citizen though steam

VPN - Proton VPN (my suggestion)

Windows 10 - Fedora KDE

My suggestions if you want a smoother transition, repeated ones have Linux versions

I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

• AMD drivers: use the built-in MESA drivers that include the official AMD support.

• Gmail: ProtonMail for the service, Kmail for the desktop client.

• Chrome: Firefox, or Librewolf if you care about privacy.

• Office365: LibreOffice for full FOSS or OnlyOfficr for less freedom but more comfort.

• iTunes: depends entirely on what you use it for, but I buy my music mostly off of BandCamp these days.

• MuseScore: MuseScore

• Norton: Why were you using Norton in the first place? It's practically a virus itself. If you need an antivirus on Linux, you might want ClamAV/ClamTK for something that runs locally only, or Microsoft Defender for Linux.

• Py-Charm: Py-Charm, VSCode, Vim, Kate/KWrite

• Remote Desktop to iOS: I got nothin'

• Star Citizen: Star Citizen

• Steam: Steam

• VPN: Wireguard

• Windows Games: install locally using Wine and then add to Steam as a non-Steam game to use Proton for better support.

Windows 10: run it in a VM if you still need it, or keep it on a separate SSD and dual boot into that.

Add Steam to "Windows gaming for Linux." Every game I bought on Windows runs great in Linux Mint. Steam has a native Linux client and ot uses a Wine layer called Proton that has all the settings for each game.

Star Citizen runs just fine under linux. For the most part, anyway. Being under active dev it breaks occasionally, but the Linux User Group has always gotten it working again so far.

https://github.com/starcitizen-lug/lug-helper

I would recommend using Wine directly over using Lutris right now, but that's an option you can pick in this script. Join the discord if you have trouble, people are friendly there if you're polite.

Don't use Proton/Steam for it.

Lol that table is pretty strange

What does "Windows 10" mean? XD

Also btw dont expect all games to work in Wine. You should use Steam if you want a pain free experience.

• Gmail: any paid hoster
• pycharm is on linux
• Star Citizen runs in Proton, no?
• Remote desktop: look into VNC, i like Rustdesk
• VPN: Wireguard
• Norton AV: no need
• Windows 10: scrap it

I self host sunshine and use the moonlight client on iOS for my remote desktop. It’s meant for in home game streaming, but using Tailscale I can connect from anywhere.

gmail -> proton or tuta if you don't care about IMAP, or any other decent email provider (I use disroot, I set my brother up with mailfence, they both seem quite good. I use them with thunderbird) pycharm -> not an IDE, but I like VSCodium (vscode without MS)

Maybe add Only Office.

If you have nothing to lose, ie. if you don't play anything with anticheat or you don't use any productivity software with crazy DRM platform-locking you into Windows, do it, switch over.

The bulk of all games will run in Proton or even vanilla WINE now and the minority that's platform-locked into Windows is anything that uses kernel-level anticheat, if you only play single-player games or even virtual board games like Civilization, those will broadly work fine in WINE/Proton and even in the case of the aforementioned Civilization, those games starting from Civ5 onward even have native Linux ports, but the Windows versions tend to perform better in Proton, and as for productivity software, there's plenty of alternatives to things like Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere/AfterEffects to choose from that isn't platform-locked anywhere, eg. Blender as a Maya alternative, Krita or GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, RawTherapee or Darktable as a Lightroom alternative, and KdenLive or Davinci Resolve as a Premiere/AfterEffects alternative.

Oh, and as for Illustrator, you have Inkscape as an alternative, and for Paint Tool SAI, you got MyPaint as an alternative.

As for a good distro to get you started, Debian or OpenSUSE seem pretty solid for beginners, and Debian Stable at least has a backports repo for newer software, and there's also ChimeraOS if you're building your PC into a games console.

Also, if you're looking for a good Foobar2k or iTunes alternative, Fooyin is great for that, and Whipper's a good CD ripper and basically an open Exact Audio Copy clone, although it's text-based. You could also use CUERipper in WINE as another good open alternative to Exact Audio Copy, which is proprietary. CUETools will work fine in Mono as well.

Remmina for Remote Desktop, awesome piece of software.