Shouldn’t do much if you only have 1 other desktop. For example I used Pop!_OS for years which comes with Gnome, but I MUCH prefer KDE Plasma so I had that installed the whole time and just never touched Gnome (it was still there, removing it would have broken stuff).

I think your best bet is Gameboy emulation for gaming, that GPU isn’t gonna be doing any 3D stuff any time soon unfortunately

KDE Neon or Linux Mint will be your best betnfor a Windows-style layout. Just keep in mind it still isn’t Windows so stuff will he different

Pokémon Blue on a used Gameboy color when I was like 8. All downhill from there.

You may need to move away from Ubuntu to an Ubuntu-based distro. Pop!_OS still packages firefox as a deb

Pretty much any distro will do, but Ubuntu-based ones tend to be easier to use due to having menus and buttons for most everything. As for apps, here are my suggestions

_3D

Blender

_DAW

Ardour

LMMS

Bitwig

~VIDEO EDITING~

Davinci Resolve (if on Nvidia)

Kdenlive

Olive (alpha software, be wary of crashes and save often)

_IMAGES

GIMP

Krita

Photopea (web app)

Inkscape

Lights may be possible with OpenRGB but I haven’t personally messed with these kinda of software

Start with something designed around a graphical interface, pretty much anything based on Ubuntu will do this (Linux Mint, Zorin, Pop!_OS, etc).

If you use Nvidia Pop!_OS has an ISO file with Nvidia drivers already installed. It isn’t hard to get Nvidia drivers on other distros but the more done for you the better.

Also recommend, refind has saved my dual boot machines more times than I can count

Welcome to dual booting with Windows! Best advice I can give is try to keep Windows away from your Linux drive as it doesn’t like to share. A 2nd drive for your Linux install can save a ton of headache (I went so far as to put Windows on my old PC when I upgraded).

“Gaming” distros, save for Steam OS as that’s for a console-like device.

Pretty much every distro can play games relatively close in performance to any other distro. The only real difference is how new your GPU drivers are.

I think Lemmy, like Mastodon, will crumble if people don’t wrap their heads around federation. Mastodon stuggled because everyone just joined mastodon.social, not understanding that the server you join only affects your local timeline.

We need to teach people that you can join a small instance and still get 99% of the stuff you want from every other instance