There’s ReactOS, which is not Linux either and targets the early 2000s Windows versions. Though it doesn’t just look like Windows, it’s made to be compatible and capable of running those old Windows apps

https://reactos.org/what-is-reactos/

There’s also Haiku which has the old Windows look, but prettier imo. It’s not Linux, it’s based on BeOS, and it’s still in beta so not fully usable yet, but it’s a pretty cool project

https://www.haiku-os.org/about/

Edit: okay none of those are actually Linux distros so it doesn’t really answers the op 😅

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The price difference does make sense, it’s the cost to cover therapy for the employee that was forced to preinstall Windows on a computer for the thousandth time

Hey I’m glad to know there are people who also like Claws 😄 I was really sad to give it up, apart from html it did everything I needed with zero annoyances

It’s true that Nobara is rather new compared to most other distros and doesn’t have as many resources or people, so that’s something to consider. I really like the modifications they make to make gaming a lot easier though. But yeah if you’re not sure what to choose, Mint is perfectly fine.

Try Nobara if you plan on playing video games, it’s a distro specialised for gaming and they have two sets of ISO : one “standard” and one “Nvidia” with the drivers preinstalled so you don’t have to do anything.

https://nobaraproject.org/

I think the installer gives you a choice between the open-source drivers and the proprietary ones, and that’s it. Everything works fine even on Wayland.

You mean Lemmy threads aren’t indexed by search engines ? So if we move everything to lemmy there goes the only way to find good info online which is adding “reddit” to the search bar ?

I can’t find out if it supports POP3 and MailDir, as I mentioned the documentation is… not very helpful

Cool if Thunderbird hasn’t gotten the same treatment as Firefox, I hope that continues (though I wouldn’t say I have much confidence in Mozilla not to muck that up too…) True you can switch, but you might lose all your previous emails if you have set up your client to use POP3 and it doesn’t save your downloaded emails in a format that is portable 😬 …which is exactly what I did when I tried Thunderbird a year ago 😑 That’s why this time I want to be less stupid and be sure I choose a client that supports MailDir

And also, what distro might be best for me?

• For gaming and if you just want things to work without being bothered, Nobara. It’s a Fedora base, which is good for gaming because you will have updates more quickly than other distros, but not so quick that you will get bad updates breaking stuff. It’s Fedora but heavily modified for gaming, and has a lot of stuff already set up that you would need to do manually to improve gaming on another distro. It uses KDE as a Desktop Environment which is pretty good and similar-looking to Windows (a task bar on the bottom, a start menu, a system tray, etc) and you can customize it extensively.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself? Antiwhat ? Just kidding.

• You’re not installing softwares by running executables found on random websites, so you at least have less chances of accidentally installing malware that way (not saying that happened to me a lot on Windows… but not saying that it didn’t 😅 ).
• The best known antivirus on linux is clamAV, but it’s command line only. It’s not very complicated to use, but if you want a graphical interface there are several applications that are clamAV frontends (clamAV still does the actual scanning and such, but the application gives you a graphical interface to interact with it)

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

• For Steam games, the Steam app has Proton, which enables you to play Windows games on Linux, and most will work just fine. There will always be a few games that require tinkering, or that won’t work at all, but not many. You can check ProtonDB to see if your games run well with Proton (https://www.protondb.com/ ) and if a game won’t run, you can check it to see if people have posted solutions (sometimes it’s as easy as copy-pasting a command into the game’s launch options, and poof, there goes the DirectX error !
• For GoG games, and also games from other stores (EA, Epic, etc) you can install Lutris which will use Wine to make your non-Linux games work on linux. As will Proton, there will be a few games that won’t cooperate. All in all, I’d say less than 5% of my games don’t work or require tinkering, and I have a lot of them.
• If you play multiplayer online games that use kernel-level anticheats, you might be fucked (though I’d argue that it’s a good thing, because the game not working is much preferable to the security risk posed by kernel-level anticheats…). Some games are still playable without the anti-cheat activated, you just can’t join competitive servers without the anticheat, while other games won’t work at all.

Ouch that must sucks 🫤

I do remember Thunderbird being kinda slow when I tried it on my potato grade laptop… I assume Betterbird isn’t any faster ?

Oh that’s good to know ! Does this mean it doesn’t have the same annoying opt-out “features” than Firefox ? Like the sponsored links, the “privacy preserving” ads, and so on ? Also you said you can switch to a different client if something happens, but doesn’t Thunderbird use mbox which from what I understand is not portable to other clients ?

Yes I would really have liked to have kept it but the lack of html formatting is a deal breaker… it’s still a very good mail client that doesn’t get enough love though

Yes it’s an awesome mail client, but alas I do need to write HTML formatted messages occasionally 😢

It’s both but mostly Mozilla, I got fed up with Firefox and having to go through settings to see if there’s anything weird enabled by default like telemetry and ads, and never knowing when Mozilla might add yet another wonderful opt-out feature like “privacy preserving ads”. I really don’t want to go through the same thing with my email client and my trust in Mozilla is somewhere down in the Earth’s mantle. But I guess I shouldn’t have called it “awful” since it’s very subjective, for me personally it was a pain to find anything when I tried, even after trying to tweak it. I didn’t know it had forks though, thanks I’ll check them out !