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I’m of the opinion that if you’re a newbie to Linux and want to use a more GUI-centric distro, then be my guest, telling someone to jump straight into something like Arch when they’re just ditching Windows for the first time is more likely to just turn them off Linux forever.

That said, as said newbie gets more comfortable with the terminal, Arch is there if they want more of a challenge, and even then with archinstall, the main difficult part is effectively nullified, although for more advanced, long-term users, fully manual installation is still there on the Arch ISO as an option, but I’d be more likely to point them to something like Debian or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to start with.

Even for Doom3, both vanilla and BFG, and RTCW, Steam versions included, Lutris allows you to install native community ports for those pretty easily too.

There might be some cases even for single-player games where DRM platform-locks you into Windows but that’s rare from my understanding.

You’ll need an original iPod, iPod Mini, or iPod Video or Classic for Rockbox compatibility. iPod Touch is just an iPhone without the phone, so it’s locked into iOS, but the original iPod, and iPod Mini, Video, and Classic all support Rockbox.

I presume any generation of iPod Shuffle or Nano is also locked into Apple firmware.

As I pointed out, if you have an older iPod, eg. like an iPod Video or Classic, or any other player that supports it, Rockbox is a thing you can flash onto it.

I’d recommend Lutris over Heroic both because it runs locally where Heroic is Electron, and because Lutris allows community-based native Linux ports for games where applicable, eg. for Ultima VII: The Black Gate + The Forge of Virtue, Lutris gives you the option of installing that game with Exult instead of DOSbox, for Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II, you have the option to install those with OpenLara, for Doom 1 and 2, you have the option to install those with ZDoom, for Little Big Adventure, you can install that with the ScummVM runner, etc.

Also, at least for DOS games where you don’t have the option to install a community-based modern port, you can use native DOSbox as a runner instead of Windows DOSbox as well through Lutris.

Oh, and one more bonus particularly for GOG games in Lutris’ favor over Heroic, is Lutris uses the offline installers so that if anything ever goes wrong with any given GOG game, you can just reinstall from the offline installer where Heroic operates more like GOG Galaxy or Steam in that it’s always downloaded from scratch.

Fooyin’s a really good alternative and if you can flash Rockbox onto an older iPod that supports that custom firmware, then it’ll just function as a normal external drive, no iTunes sync needed unlike with stock Apple firmware.

If you have nothing to lose, ie. if you don’t play anything with anticheat or you don’t use any productivity software with crazy DRM platform-locking you into Windows, do it, switch over.

The bulk of all games will run in Proton or even vanilla WINE now and the minority that’s platform-locked into Windows is anything that uses kernel-level anticheat, if you only play single-player games, those will broadly work fine in WINE/Proton, and as for productivity software, there’s plenty of alternatives to things like Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere/AfterEffects to choose from that isn’t platform-locked anywhere, eg. Blender as a Maya alternative, Krita or GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, RawTherapee or Darktable as a Lightroom alternative, and KdenLive or Davinci Resolve as a Premiere/AfterEffects alternative.

Oh, and as for Illustrator, you have Inkscape as an alternative, and for Paint Tool SAI, you got MyPaint as an alternative.

As for a good distro to get you started, Debian or OpenSUSE seem pretty solid for beginners, and Debian Stable at least has a backports repo for newer software, and there’s also ChimeraOS if you’re building your PC into a games console.

Also, if you’re looking for a good Foobar2k or iTunes alternative, Fooyin is great for that, and Whipper’s a good CD ripper and basically an open Exact Audio Copy clone, although it’s text-based. You could also use CUERipper in WINE.

There’s plenty of single-player games that don’t use any sort of anticheat you can play and that work fine on WINE and Proton.

Debian’s pretty good, or if you need something a bit newer, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed seems pretty good as well in terms of a beginner’s distro.

Stuff like this is why if you develop an emulator, that you’re better off self-hosting your own git repos, and optionally hosting on Tor/I2P to completely cover your tracks for good measure.

You got Fooyin as a viable, and even really good, open alternative to Foobar2k.

Element’s still Electron-based for the desktop app, given Electron is Chromium and Google has the final say over Chromium, that doesn’t make it trustworthy at least in my opinion and I’m sure others’ opinions too.

I thought AutoCAD was pretty much the industry standard for CAD unless something changed.

Some governments outside the US either already have or are ditching Windows for Linux.

No it’s not, it’s based on BSD, or more specifically Darwin, which is derived from BSD, so Unix-like, but not Linux.

Although, oddly, macOS is a certified UNIX OS so it can rightfully sit at the table with the SysV distros such as AIX, HP-UX, or Solaris, but it’s nothing like those OSes in its nature.

Fooyin, VLC, and Kodi.

• ‘You can keep your old hardware, we won’t force you to upgrade.’
• ‘Your old GPU, yes, even your R9 Fury, still has a home here, don’t worry, we won’t leave you out in the cold unlike our competition.’

…Among other jabs at Windows in the spirit of the old Mac vs. PC ads, or to be more apt, in the spirit of Sega’s old ads picking on Nintendo in the '90s.

Also…

• ‘Linux does! What Windon’t.’

That depends, the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games are easily modded regardless of OS, and I’ve had good luck with HedgeModManager too for Sonic Generations, and even for Civ3, C3X fixes the black map bug however I haven’t found a good fix for the crackling and popping audio.

I’m more of a proponent for running some Linux distro for my main OS and then virtualizing Windows if desired for things that are broken in WINE/Proton somehow but work fine in Windows, at this point.

I don’t trust Windows enough to run it baremetal in a dual-boot anymore though, virtualization at least isolates it from the host where it counts, where in a dual-boot, even if it generally doesn’t happen, there’s still the looming threat of Windows screwing up the Linux install somehow, where that isn’t a problem when virtualizing since, as I said, it’s isolated where it counts, even if paravirtualization is a thing for storage drivers and networking and the like, and hardware passthrough is a thing for things like GPUs.