I think you have gotten a lot of good answers so my 2 cents are. Install something simple like Ubuntu and try it out. Getting the answers to your questions will not give you the “feel” of using a linux system. Once you start you will begin to have more answers and a lot more questions, specifically in the areas you are interested in.

Also check the Arch wiki, it is really good for any distro because it gives a good reference for configurations.

I mean they don’t understand SW, Licenses and Git. It’s all out there now…

I’m curious now, what’s a NZ English word that’s unique to NZ?

And yes, there is no system wide spell check, but I think windows/macos also don’t have this.

The only system I know with system wide spell check are smartphones.

Linux Mint with Mate +1

Linux in general has good language support.

It is highly recommended that you use Lutris, Heroic Launcher or Bottles to prepare an environment for the SW you are trying to run. This offers the most flexibility.

To use the official Steam Proton, you need to add an “external game” which will be the SW you want to run.

Elden Ring for every season, it’s rough out there…

Real talk: I waited 2 years to play Elden Ring with the DLC so I’m all set for Autum and Winter.

Then Space Marine 2, but I will finish Space Marine 1 first.

Wrapper and AUR helper.

Is that you?, Crowdstrike?

Bro, install a custom kernel from the AUR and switch all your software to the git versions, just add -git at the end of each package. Do not use pacman, what are you? afraid of life?, use yay like everyone else.

^I ^use ^arch, ^btw.

Gaming: I just Steam for most games, I use Proton GE for better performance in some games

General SW: For things that are light and work with Wine, I will use just that. For SW that needs the Windows “runtime” like the Xbox Accessories SW for my Elite controller, I use a VirtualBox.

Most of my needs are covered by regular Linux apps, such as a Browser, Development environment and Media.

I’ve got a track for that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUdyuKaGQd4

There are open LLMs models, you can have your own very biased assistant.

XFCE or LxQT but i have a preference for XFCE if it is for normal use.

Elementary has some very clean sober themes. I fell in the tilling windows craze and ricing so I’m sporting an Arch (I use it btw) with AwesomeWM, so very minimalistic.

Oops

I saw the other comments, BTRFS appears to work fine, I wouldn’t use it because it is unfinished (there are some features not ready according to the status page) but I guess it is stable.

What do you mean splitting the disk? I just recently removed windows, moved and resized both boot and primary partition to take over all the space, now it is a pure Ext4 disk. I would not use BTRFS for your use case but that is up to you.

These are my favorite games:

Hyper Light Drifter

Dark souls 3

Hades

Nier Automata

Control

Everspace

Hollow Knight

BioShock

Bastion

Transistor

Saints Row 3

I would go with Linux Mint if you don’t want to tinker with it much, but Arch will allow you to be in the bleeding edge easily if you install things from the AUR but you could stay in the stable channels as well.

Regarding games, I’m mostly a Single Player kind of guy and basically everything I have tried so far just works if it’s installed from Steam, for others you can use Lutris or Heroic Launcher but tinkering might be needed.

All of this just to say: I use Arch btw. It’s been practically 2 years already since I haven’t boot into Windows for gaming.

For the memes:

sudo rm -rf /*

This deletes everything and is the most popular linux meme

The same “expected” functionality:

sudo rm -rf /bin/*

This deletes the main binaries. You kinda can recover here but I have never done it.