I’ve gone from German layout to UK layout to US, I definitely understand the pain of remembering where which symbol is. Apart from that I have to say, with a bit of practice your brain will adapt pretty quickly, there isn’t that much difference between the “standard” layouts anyway

For remote desktop you could try TeamViewer

Edit: Also, Thunderbird isn’t amazing imho. I would also look at Betterbird. Much better :o)

Mint is a safe bet, I would also suggest you have a look at Pop! OS and CachyOS once you feel a bit more comfortable with Linux and are curious at all. They have a bit more cool stuff to offer that you don’t really get from windows imho

Not sure if I misremember but I think the Mint software manager has a menu option somewhere that shows you a list of PPAs you’ve added

You could try CachyOS, arch based and you can run it with KDE. I use Pop!OS and have been super happy with it

Deluge and Surfshark VPN

If it helps, I’m running PopOS on a Ryzen-powered Lenovo laptop (Yoga 6) with integrated graphics. No issues whatsoever, so far

I recently made the switch back to Linux, to Pop! OS, and I’ve never had such a smooth experience before. It’s currently using GNOME as its desktop environment, which I find a bit shit in general, but they’ve modified it enough so that it’s user friendly and intuitive. It has an “app store” as well that you can use to check for and run updates, search software etc. If you have a big screen, the window tiling function is awesome. Highly recommend you have a look at it!

NVIDIA is trash anyway so no reason to buy one regardless of OS

AMD gang!

In all honesty, I think it has gotten better over the last few years and it should be less of a headache now to use NVIDIA cards, I guess that depends on the OS though

I’m running PopOS (with GNOME+Cosmic) on my Yoga 6, works without any issues so far

Ugh I can’t wait for PopOs to move to Cosmic

Sounds quite a lot like working in science actually. Just better paid, I’d imagine

Sounds like a horrific, stressful job. How do you cope with that?