Based on this post I’m gonna say take it slow with a dual boot or live installation, if at all. You mention a lot of IMO fairly minor and subjective look and feel type criteria that indicate that you’ll be quite bothered by minor changes. Using Linux is going to involve major changes. If you’re not willing to leave your comfort zone and relearn a few things, might as well stay on Windows.

People here seem to have not answered all your questions, so ill try to here:

1. Im not a text editor power user so i dont know about the features meself, but vscode or kate seem like what you want, although you can also simply just run Notepad++ through wine.

2. Looks like you can run Itunes through wine, but i dont use any apple devices so i would not know.

3. GOG games work great with heroic games launcher, and you can run EA app through wine with lutris.*

4. perfect. (on some distros you may need to install a drive, but thats a onetime thing)

5. i use haruna and celluloid, theyre both great.

6. no clue

7. there are several batch renamer tools for linux, Krename looks like what you are looking for.

8. With kde at least, you can make keyboard shortcuts for most everything.

9. if its not packaged for your distro, you have to compile it. But most apps nowadays are available in flatpak or appimage, so the package segmentation problem is mostly solved. *

also, very important!!, you should install apps from the app store, it takes care of selecting the best version and updating it and everything, you should avoid installing apps like on windows.

10. Given you are a power user i would strongly recommend something kde based, kde has the most complete gui configuration out of the big linux de’s, and offers many advanced options. Good distros that ship kde include fedora and tuxedoOS*

Also, you shouldnt try to replicate your windows workflow exactly in linux, that’s a recipe for failure, you should try to find better (linux) ways of doing things.

*i skimmed over details, ask if you want clarification.

In the time it took you to write that you could have installed Linux and had a better idea than any of this back and forward.

i think you should check out KDE plasma just in general.

1. Kate, Neovim, Emacs, +lots and lots more, pick your poison.

2. QEMU/KMV can host windows guests pretty flawlessly, pain to setup though. I use it to work in visual studio for college stuff. USB passthrough should work. No idea about thunderbolt though.

3. Native games work as expected, not native games only work through a translator either raw Wine or Proton (is better suited for games). They have frontends, such as Steam, Lutris, and other. Not all games work through translators. Consult protondb for games you want to play.

4. Natively? No idea, didn’t play a single native game. Through Steam - flawlessly.

5. Playing video through mpv has GUI. It has GUI. For videos. You might want to consider VLC, if audio GUI is a requirement. Or any other GUI audio player.

6. Any DAW/video editor. I’ll bet my life on that 90% of them use ffmpeg. Tools like flacon most likely use ffmpeg. It’s everywhere.

7. rename command. Probably dolphin and nautilus have mass renamers with a GUI, but I only used rename and it gets the job done.

8. Depends on your desktop environment, kde probably has support for anything shortcut related.

9. On Linux we usually don’t install random shit we download through browser. That’s what package managers are for, every base distro has its own package manager with its own structure. And if package managers are lacking then we get source code and build it. In very rare cases like Reaper DAW probably only then we download binaries.

More about fragmentation: Linux uses ELF executables. Amd64 elves will work on every amd64 Linux machine (that has required libs). Some distros package apps into intermediary archives that are prebuilt into a more structure friendly to that distro way. If you install one distros prebuilt archive on another one, it might install files into different dirs and you will not know how to get out of that situation. All Linux software is available under every distro, if you include building from source as an option. If you really must download shit off of web and install it but it doesn’t display your exact distro follow these instructions: 1. child distro usually can install base distro’s intermediary archives and be ok about it, example: ubuntu is child to debian, popos is child to ubuntu. 2. Extract archive and locate the binaries, that’s it. Then put it somewhere in $HOME/.local/opt and ln -s fullpathtoappbin fullpathtolocalbinarydir or just run from $HOME/Downloads.

10. I stopped reading around here, that’s way too much fucking text for me alone.

1. Pretty much any reasonably maintained editor has these features. Even without doing any programming VSCode is a good place to start, otherwise, a lot of desktop environments have their own editors, such as KDE’s Kate.
2. You can use a vm, but I believe you can also just run iTunes through Wine. I haven’t done so personally, so mileage may vary.
3. I do all of my gaming on linux, with the exceptions of games with an invasive anticheat. Have yet to find something that just plain does not work. Otherwise, performance is on par, or ironically, better in rare cases. Your first stop here should be Protondb and AWACY. With newest stable Proton, or Proton-GE, you will rarely have issues.
4. Expect support for these
5. mpv by itself does the job
6. No comment here, i use cli.
7. No comment again, I use cli. KDE has a batch renamer in the frameworks bundle
8. Your usual shortcuts work as expected, although keep in mind that some are modified for terminal emulators, for example Shift+Ctrl+C instead of Ctrl+C. Otherwise, your desktop environment, or keybind manager of choice will let you change just about anything.
9. Segmentation is mostly an illusion here. There are several major choices: Debian, Arch, Fedora, Nix, Gentoo, and SUSE. Everything else is a derivative of these. Some offer minor changes, some offer more considerable ones. Generally, the differences between Linux distributions is just the package manager. Find what works for you, and look from there.

I suggest you try Endeavour. It’s a good all-rounder, and if you don’t like manual installation of Arch, it takes the effort out of that. Otherwise, it’s essentially the same. Simple, and just works. The wiki is your friend

Can’t answer for all your requirements but for the gist of it I’m guessing you’d like KDE. I guess you’d like Kate as your text editor and Krename as your file rename tool. It comes with some Windows-y keyboard shortcuts set by default as Win+L to lock the screen (and ask for your password).

Can’t tell about ffmpeg nor mpv GUI frontends as I’m more of a cli person but I seem to recall there are several KDE/Qt frontends for mpv and it won’t be surprising if there’s one for ffmpeg too.

As for your distro question I’d try Fedora if I were you, though you might feel adventurous and try with Arch (and surely you’ll learn a thing or two about Linux and your computer).

Other than that, the nice people in here surely can give you better options.

Way too much text, so I’ll just answer 9.
If the software is available for Linux, it will be available for Debian-based distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) and Arch (through the AUR).
As a beginner, I’d go with Linux Mint. You don’t go to a website, download a file and install it, though.
Again, as a beginner, you search for the software in your distro’s software center.

I’d say play with Linux in Virtualbox or Hyper-V. I used the former before transitioning.

Also, I’d say don’t use Ubuntu; it jumped the shark years ago and has lost much of its quality.

I usually recommend PopOS for people new to Linux, as I find it to basically be decrapitated Ubuntu.

I don’t personally use openSuSe (I’m a big Debian/XFCE guy), but its YaST settings are more comprehensive than other distros.

However, I would warn you you might not be able to avoid config files and terminal sometimes, though. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, though; sometimes, the terminal and text files are the most efficient way to do something and a GUI simply can’t expose a program’s full power. That’s why I recommend you starting in a VM - you can have a bit of fun without the full commitment.

As for ffmpeg, I don’t know that there is a good GUI. Honestly, though, learning command line ffmpeg isn’t the worst idea - I’ve found it very useful and something I got used to. If that doesn’t work for you, then best of luck finding a GUI.

For trying to run applications designed for a different distro, you could use distrobox. However, it’s pretty rare these days that an application doesn’t have a universal Flatpak. Honestly, if an application is deliberately limited to one distro, I find it isn’t worth it and may signal low software quality.

For notepad++, you could use something like VSCodium, but honestly, if you’re used to Notepad++, just run it under Wine.

For virtualization, don’t use Virtualbox on Linux. It doesn’t use the built in hypervisor module, KVM, but its own proprietary one. I’d recommend the Virt Manager GUI instead.

Most distros seem to have OpenSnitch in their repos.

As others have already said, Kate should work as text editor. I think, the only thing that’s not built-in is base64 en-/decoding, but you can set that up like this:

That’s for decoding. For encoding, just change the name to “base64 encode” (exact name doesn’t matter) and remove the “–decode” from the Arguments-field.
This relies on a CLI utility called base64, which is going to be pre-installed on most distros.
It’s not entirely perfect, because it’ll always insert a newline, as that’s part of the base64 output. If you do want to get rid of that, you could write a tiny script and then call that script instead, but obviously, you don’t have to.

You can also install Kate on Windows, if you want to give it a test-ride: https://kate-editor.org/
(The base64 CLI won’t be available on Windows, though.)

I don’t get why you need an mpv frontent because mpv itself is a frontend but controls are keyboard based. If i has to use one without knowing keybindings, i would use VLC, instead of using a player which runs mpv inside it

A lot of great advice from others here. Must admit i didnt read your whole post, pretty long. So this is more of general advice for switching. Also fairly long, so i dont blame you if you dont read this whole thing lol

I feel like you should find a good way to dip your toes into linux before you fully commit. Dual booting can be complicated, and will break from time to time. You should either spin up a virtual machine, or install linux on an old pc or laptop to test the waters, and figure out your new workflow. This is really my main piece of advice. Use both for a while.

Try to use linux the linux way, dont try to use it the way you use windows. A year or so ago LTT did a series of videos where they were using linux exclusively for a month. I was constantly frustrated when they tried to do things like manually copy files to the non user filesystem. You generally should never do that, and there is usually a location in your user directory that a program will also look for these files. You obviously won’t know what the linux way to do things is right away, but that’s part of why you want to use both windows and linux for a while. You will likely break your system at some point doing things wrong, when you dont know its wrong. Then just reinstall fresh and go again.

You should get a passing familiarity with the command line. You can do a majority of stuff in the gui, but when you run into problems, most advice online will use command line because it is mostly universal between distros and desktop environments. Linux is basically command line first, with a ton of great graphical front ends on top of it.

I expect the biggest pain points will be proprietary software that you might miss. Despite the claims of the linux evangelicals, there is not a good replacement for photoshop depending on what you use it for. Gimp works well for photo editing, but when i worked in marketing and had to pump out a bunch of ads quickly, it was a bit much to use gimp for. Just using that as an example. Stuff like this will be a major adjustment.

Ive been using linux almost exclusively for over 20 years, so i dont have much insight on how to make an easy transition. In fact when i have to use windows for work or something, i generally set it up with more of a linux workflow. Using lots of command line software etc

Good luck, have fun, and dont get too frustrated when things break!

@amazingsparrow

Sounds like you have a specific set of needs. Changing OSes can be like moving homes or learning to fly a new airplane type. It’ll takes time & trial/error to get everything dialed in just right.

Most people I’ve seen have success with debian-based LTS variants. Debian/Ubuntu /Mint. Long-Term-Support = 5 years or more of consistency. There’s broad h/w support for both Debian and rpm-based linuxes, so either flavor would work, but unsure if rpm-based have LTS options.

10. You probably want a distro that comes with KDE Plasma. Ubuntu uses GNOME and is not as customizable Plasma ootb. KDE Neon for more stable, Manjaro for more bleeding-edge. Note that you can install Plasma on distros that don’t come with it so you don’t have to get those distros for Plasma.

11. The reason different distros may be listed for installing software on Linux is purely because of the different package managers that the distros use. You won’t run into any software that works on one distro and won’t work on another. The only difference may be the way to install it. The universal way is to build it from source, but if you’re not up for that then check your distro repo via the distros software store, check Flathub for a flatpak version (software stores are usually already configured to use Flathub as a source), or if you’re on an Arch-based distro like Manjaro, check the AUR.

12. KDE Plasma has exactly the keyboard shortcut functionality you’re looking for.

I can only confidently answer for some of these

3. the Heroic launcher is probably what you’re looking for and it should work really well. You may also be interested in looking up Lutris and Bottles for other games.

4. these should work 1:1 on most desktop enviroments from my experience. If not, they should be quite easy to configure

5. most of the time software will be available natively as a Debian package, and then other distros. Sometimes there won’t be a native package for your system, especially if you use anything outside of Debian, Arch, Fedora or their derivatives. If that happens there’s distro agnostic Flatpak, which works a charm. You also have tools like alien or dpkg, which convert formats from one system to a different one. They are slightly hit and miss, but a great tool if you’ve exhausted othe avenues

6. I vovch for what other people have said, Fedora KDE. It works out of the box, has lots of customizability and you don’t need to use the command line much at all. You might be interested in lagging one version behind (the three latest distros are supported at any given time, to allow people to skip one when updating) and install Fedora 39 so that any possible bugs are completely ironed out and compatibility of packages and programs is higher.

I would also recommend Linux Mint 21.3 (for the same reasons as I said to lag one version behind with Fedora, I would recommend to only update between one X.3 version and the next X.3 version) but the Cinnamon desktop environment might be a bit simple for what you’re looking for. It’s made for people coming from Windows though, so it will feel very familiar.

Boot them both up as a live system and fiddle around with them for a bit. You can keep your session and everything in it as long as you don’t unplug the pendrive or reboot the computer, so you can reslly take it for a week- or a month-long spin if you really want.