For backups I don’t think full disk backups are ever needed or useful. Because if the system is running there’s always a chance of corruption. Besides 90% of what’s on your system is recoverable, so you should automate that part and backup what is not recoverable, i.e. personal documents. I use Borg, check out Pika or Vorta for some GUIs for it, and I use Borgbase for my remote, but you can also backup to some folder.

For the other two you need windows. Even if you managed to get vscode to compile and tested with wine, that’s not a guarantee that it will work on Windows. Same thing for excel, even if libre office had those features it’s not guaranteed that stuff that works there would work on excel.

If you need windows for work you need to find a way to have windows available, trying to circumvent this would be a source of pain.

I mean, he’s joking, but:

AMD Drivers: yeah, this one’s not a thing

Chrome: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/EWW.html

Gmail: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryMail

Office 360: https://orgmode.org/

I-Tunes: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/itunes.el (although this one probably doesn’t work)

JBL: I have no idea what it is

Muse score: https://github.com/piercegwang/staff-mode

Anti-virus: I don’t know of any, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone listed a plugin for checking files

PyCharm: This is the one he said to use Vim

Remote desktop: Emacs can natively open remote files or directories

Star citizen: obviously not

Steam: Obviously not, because it’s proprietary, I really wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a GOG plugin

VPN: https://github.com/anticomputer/ovpn-mode

There’s some truth to the joke that emacs is a very complete Operating system.

He said remote desktop to iOS not from iOS, that means he needs a client on his desktop to access the server on the phone. If it was android the answer is scrcpy but I’m not aware of any such tools for iOS (since I don’t own an iOS device).

AMD Drivers: if your GPU is new enough (which it probably is since you’re playing Star citizen) it should be just magic here since they come together with the kernel.

Chrome: it’s available for Linux, no need to switch. Although Firefox is very nice too.

Gmail: not sure what you mean, Gmail is a website, those are available on any platform. If you meant a desktop email client (which honestly I have never in my life used) there’s Thunderbird.

Office 360: Are you talking about Microsoft 365? Is that not a website too? In any case Libre office is a nice alternative to the classical Office desktop app too in case you want that.

I-Tunes: A quick search online reveals people use wine to run the Windows version of iTunes, although I would probably consider migrating. Spotify has a native client and there are some places where you can buy music and have it locally for playback.

JBL: not sure what this is other than a brand for speakers.

Anti-virus: You almost assuredly don’t need an anti-virus on Linux, as long as you install software through the proper channels (i.e. using the package manager) chances of virus are so small it’s not something to worry about. Most Linux anti-virus serve to check windows binaries in the system to avoid someone using the Linux machine to send virus to Windows users.

PyCharm: it’s available for Linux

Remote desktop to iOS: Not sure this is possible even on Windows, I use remmina for remote desktop, it supports several ways of connecting to the other device so maybe see if it works for you.

Star citizen: Never played it but it seems to be playable with Wine.

Steam: While steam is available not all games are compatible, check out https://www.protondb.com/ to see the status of any specific Steam game.

VPN: should be native on Linux, there’s a protocol caller OpenVPN which most VPN providers will give you a Config file for that you can use directly on the network applet on Linux.

PS: Next time share the list in text, it makes it easier to reply

What’s your GPU? Nvidia’s you will need to use the proprietary drivers, AMD it depends on how old it is but newer ones should be good with the default driver.

From the issues you mentioned on Ubuntu I think it’s likely you have an Nvidia since it doesn’t play completely nice with Wayland all of the time, which sucks because X11 is halfway out of the window.

Another thing I think you probably know but just in case, you can install different Desktop Environments on the same distro, no need to change distros for that. So you could install Plasma (and yes, Plasma is KDE) or Gnome on your existing mint installation.

Honestly I think Mint is great for beginners and if you’re happy with it there’s no reason to switch. One thing I always recommend though is keeping /home in a separate partition so you can reinstall or switch distros without deleting your data.

That sounds like an awful system to use. I have Arch systems that date back years with unassisted updates, why does it break so much?

First to answer your main question if I were you I would try NixOS, because it’s declarative so it’s essentially impossible to break, i.e. if it breaks for whatever reason a fresh reinstall will get you back to exactly where you were.

That being said, I know it’s anecdotal but I have been using Arch for (holy crap) 15 years, and I’ve never experienced an update breaking my system. I find that most of the time people complain about Arch breaking with an update they’re either not using Arch (but Manjaro, Endeavor, etc) and rely heavily on AUR which one should specifically not do, much less on Arch derivatives. The AUR is great, but there’s a reason those packages are not on the main repos, don’t use any system critical stuff from them and you should be golden. Also try to figure out why stuff broke when it did, you’ll learn a lot about what you’re doing wrong on your setup because most people would have just updated without any issues. Otherwise it really doesn’t matter which distro you choose, mangling a distro with manual installations to the point where an upgrade breaks them can be done on most of them, and going for a fully immutable one will be very annoying if you’re so interested in poking at the system.

That’s like compiling a list of all of the hacks that happen on the internet and jump to the conclusion that the internet is bad because of it.

Some of those are just people falling for old scams/phishing that could have happened anywhere and are not a Cryptocurrency problem. Pyramid schemes are much older than Cryptocurrencies, people falling for it there would fall for it elsewhere.