The number one shock for most people when coming over to Linux is a reliance on package management for programs rather than the exe’s & msi’s of windows. In general on mint your installation methods in order should be

1.software manager 2.appimage 3.deb 4.tar

I may have forgotten some other formats since I haven’t used mint in a while, but this should allow for the smoothest experience when it comes to installing programs.

I do not believe you can disable auto update anymore on windows.

Being able to boot back to Windows in a pinch will be beneficial though.

The annoying thing is that this is not possible without sacrificing system stability, there are about half a dozen known issues with windows update removing Linux bootloaders in a dual boot system, and it has personally bricked my system twice even with booting from a separate drive. I would highly recommend making your fallback a VM like qemu or a more well integrated one like winboat, it is just not worth the risk to dual boot.

I know my wife is going to want to use Microsoft Word and Excel

Has your wife tried out the libreoffice suite or the online version of office? If not I would highly recommend the former then the later if it doesn’t work out for you, as running ms office on Linux is officially impossible and unofficially a pain in the ass.

and we always use this laptop for our taxes, so TurboTax

If it must be turbotax, a VM or wine will be the move, if it doesn’t need to be, there is opentaxsolver, although I have no experience with any of these software suites.

I have a feeling running from a USB drive will be way too slow.

In general it should more than suffice, the only thing is load times will be high, but not unbereably so.

I second this, using a live environment to try it out is the way to go, windows still has a multitude of issues with dual booting that make it impossible to recommend. As an aside, OP what are the programs that you are wary about, buy in large everything works on Linux, you just either need to use the oss alternative or in some very specific cases your Sol

I would highly recommend posting your issue with full logs in the cachyos forum and possibly the arch forum, there are many people there who will help you diagnose your issue. As for x11 vs Wayland, currently the difference doesn’t matter for the general user, but keep in mind that x11 is close to being deprecated and will not be a valid windowing system for much longer, so I would recommend to try fixing your Wayland issues if you can.

Are you using oss or proprietary driver for your GPU, this may be where some of your issue lies.

Not that I think it is the issue, but have you tried updating the system with paru? You may have a weird interaction with an aur package.

That was in response to fedora talking about removing 32 bit packages, but I believe fedora walked that back and so there is no current threat to bazzite shutting down.

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.

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.