Gaming - I enjoy gaming and want a Distro that will let me play most games. I have read that keeping nVidia drivers up to date can be (was?) a problem. I currently use steam for 99% of my gaming, I’m aware steam is porting a lot for SteamOS, but what are the limitations of this? Will I have to wait for a port before I can play a new game? Are there stability issues?

For gaming you should keep in mind that you want a distro with decently new packages to avoid issues with Nvidia & also to have the correct drivers for some titles: fedora is good for a strong base, although I heard they are doing away with there x86 libraries… I prefer endeavor os, but you will at very least need to learn to use pacman and yay, but they aren’t hard to understand if you have basic programming experience. You should also know that almost all games that are not supported on Linux nowadays are either really new, like launch day new, or they rely on an invasive anti cheat: are we anti cheat yet & proton db should give you a decent idea if your library is compatible.

I’ve developed a lot of pretty basic macros for excel in Visual Basic, I’m not a programmer by any means, but I can write some algorithms to do QoL coding. Is making the switch to open office seamless? Will my .xlsx docs incur formatting issues? Will my macros translate to whatever editor is used in open office? Does open office use the same codes for cell functions? Are there statistic package add-ons like with excel? Essentially, I’m asking how much work is ahead of me if I make this switch?

I don’t have nearly enough experience with your second point, my only thoughts are that you should be looking into libre office - it’s the most mature in my eyes, and open office has made a lot of questionable decisions recently. Also as a general rule, I would say there is about an equivalent amount of compatibility between the oss alternatives and the different versions of the Ms office suite, it will be noticeable, but so long as you don’t live and die by formatting, it will just be mildly inconvenient.

I do enjoy the old version of outlook and work with many people who use outlook calendars for scheduling. Is there a similar program that will work with the same functionality on their end? (E.g. a mail client that will allow me to accept calendar invites from others and confirm it on both ends?).

I believe you are looking for proton, they are the oss answer to the Ms and Google suites, I don’t know if you will have quite the amount of compatibility you want between people, but if that’s important just use the web versions of your preferred suite.

I am familiar with Visual Studio and use it as my IDE for very basic programming (I like to tinker with automating certain tasks in games, again by no means a programmer). Is there an equivalent FOSS version that would have a low learning curve coming from Microsoft’s IDE?

Vs code is almost entirely open source, as such, there is a project called vs codium which takes the publicly available vs code source code and keeps it fully open source, if you like the visual studio program you will hardly notice a difference.

I am unfamiliar with refind, but from my experience with systemd & grub dual boot, if you do not change your boot order in bios, there is a high chance that the windows boot manager will brick your Linux one, even across drives. My advice for dual booting is to ditch the convenience of using one boot manager. But once again, this may not be an issue you have.

If you want up to date office stuff your only option is the web version, and if up to date doesn’t matter to you you might as well switch to something that runs natively since you’ll have to deal compatibility issues anyway.

I haven’t tested it, but I have heard that the web version doesn’t even have very good compatibility with the local version which seems like it should be a focus for Microsoft considering a lot of people are paralyzed by the switch to Linux due to compatibility issues with only a select few apps, Ms office being one of them.

Thank you, I was aware of this, but I believe you are mistaken in your last sentence because Linux has always been the second one to be installed for me and the issue still crops up when I forget to heed my own advice

While I agree with your assertion in theory, I cannot agree that windows doesn’t mess with grub. I have had 5 different issues with grub being overwritten, 1 was because windows and Linux were on the same drive, but the other 4 was simply because I launched windows through grub.

My advice for people dual booting is to never launch windows through grub and instead change your boot order in bios, this has made all of my boot related issues go away.