Ask your local university facilities department about their overstock policy. The university of Arizona literally has a warehouse where you can peruse their old computers and furniture and buy at Craigslist prices.

This work for you?

https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

The desktop environment you choose is really down to what you prefer:

Like trackpads? Gnome

Like the Windows desktop (and/or like customization)? KDE

Like windows XP flat UI or brutally simple UI? Cinnamon/XFCE

Want to dive into the unknown cutting edge? Cosmic

My XM3s work flawlessly. The mics suck, but that’s the headset’s problem lol.

I have a lot of Bluetooth devices, and I haven’t found one that has any issues at all, including controllers.

I’d really like a cross platform clipboard with unlimited text clips that utilize a custom keyboard like PastePal.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clipboard-manager-pastepal/id1503446680

I’m on Fedora workstation and Nobara (on 2 different machines). Discover has Fedora system updates literally every day, which range from 350MB to sometimes over 1GB. Discover doesn’t show much detail about the updates when I click “more information” (or whatever they call it on the update screen). Again, not a huge big deal, but it is definitely different from macOS where updates are only file deltas and not entire updated packages.

iPhone music syncing is done through the Apple Music app nowadays (and Finder in macOS). The iPhone has never had drag and drop music transferring as an out of the box experience, and has always depended on iTunes or Music.app .

I’m sad to say, but if you want to load local music files to your iPhone, you’ll need to try to install Apple Music via wine and do it that way.

Fedora has been rock solid. I kinda wish I didn’t have to download 300MB-1GB updates every day, but I’m glad there’s updates!

I really wish there was more cohesiveness among software, but I can’t complain when people are trying to help that along over time.

I’ve had zero issues with Wayland.

The Nobara updater is fairly unreliable, as is Discover on my plain Fedora machine. A system update will show up, but error out or hang for no reason. Updating via dnf in the terminal has had zero issues.

I really wish there was a clearer UI for choosing which source to download a given package/app from when there are multiple sources.

I kinda wish there were more UI designers working with engineers, because some of the UI I encounter is obviously built by engineers. It’s not a problem, but if I were less technologically inclined, I might’ve seen that as a barrier to committing to Linux.

I couldn’t get it to run in wine or bottles unfortunately. The installer just crashes the bottle/wine VM.

I’m currently testing out O+Connect which is software for all Oppo/OnePlus/RedMi phones. It works better than the Apple ecosystem in some ways, but worse in others. Overall, I’m very impressed.

O+ is built natively for macOS and windows, but I’ll be attempting to install it on Linux through wine

You most likely will never earn more than 2 mil in your lifetime. With 2 orders of magnitude and a doubling factor, that’s still not 500M lmao. And just like a car purchase, that’s only for the purchase price, not the upkeep.

So on arch can you choose to run the deb anyway and get updates through the package manager, or is it that only AUR applications are the main application type? Or can you use both?

I have a number of apps that are super small teams/individual made that I can’t expect them to care about the AUR. What do you do in the case that an app developer doesn’t use the AUR?

What are some of your customizations?

you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly

Can you think of a quick example, out of curiosity?

First thing I wanna implore you do is create a separate partition on your boot drive for your /home folder. Distro hopping is super normal when you’re starting out, and by separating your home folder makes distro hopping very easy.

Bazzite, like others suggested, is your best bet at a first attempt because it’s much harder to cause irreparable damage with a stray terminal command.

All of the apps you listed should work just fine under Linux. Bazzite ships with Steam and Lutris (it’s a game store aggregator) to get you started with gaming. Use Microsoft 365 online or one of the open sourced alternatives like libreoffice for office apps. The rest of the programs should either be able to be run with wine/bottles/WinApps.

A 1050 is kinda paltry by today’s standards, so just don’t expect a big bump in gaming performance or super snappy emulation.

Option 2, with more emphasis on the login component. My files are safe, but I don’t wanna bother my buddy to 2FA me every time I need to reinstall Linux for whatever reason.

Omg thank you. I’m gonna try this out tomorrow

New problem: they have 2FA as well

Yes, lol. Long story short,I don’t have the password because it’s a shared account

It is; I want to reinstall my OS without losing my Dropbox install