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.

Regardless of bending the narrative to suit your needs, they couldn’t come up with any other top achievement, a water park hardly seems like an achievement for a country, I wouldn’t even be impressed for one of the microstates.

Not to mention that this gives him a legitimate reason to invoke the alien enemies act, not that he needed them in the first place, but it will tie up the courts even further.

No longer being considered a developing nation, any poverty will be 100% on them to fix, international agreements will expect them to contribute instead of receiving,

I could be wrong, but it seems like they are already to this point.

emissions will be more heavily scrutinized. Other countries will not be a tolerant about the rampant IP theft and extreme protectionism of their domestic markets.

I think this falls into the realm of “what are they going to do about” the only power block that cares about those ip’s are the na-eu group, which after the play for global dominance will become a rounding error to them. The emissions may bite them, but it won’t be from other nations, I have no doubt they’ll keep polluting until the problems actually manifest, basically every unchecked government in history doesn’t play proactively when it comes to environmental issues.

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.

I second this, endeavor is for all intents and purposes exactly arch with some extra branding, but what I really like about it is that their community forums are great, so if I run into a problem I can ask in endeavor forums, and if they don’t have a solution I can ask the tech gurus on the arch wiki as well.

I wouldn’t say so, for most people what you have done is good enough. However there may come a time where you have to do something janky, at that point you’ll probably wish you were on a different distro, but for 95% of people, they will never run into any issues with mint.