Somehow I love the name Sea-Rex

I feel like hyprland is really popular, or at least it’s the one I most often hear mentioned. It should be really configurable as well, so maybe it’s worth a look. I’m not sure you’re going to notice much of a performance difference though, unless the device has a really limited amount of RAM.

I think the people behind Session cares for their mission, and it might align with OP’s, so maybe. Although I personally am not too fond of about all their choices.

The omission of Forward Secrecy for instance doesn’t sit well with me. Each to their own though, and they do go into their reasoning on their blog: https://getsession.org/session-protocol-explained

Likewise their last audit from 2021, lists quite a handful of critical/moderate issues in their apps, hopefully they’ve fixet it. Afterall it’s been a while since 2021. https://getsession.org/faq#security-audit

I’m excited you’re giving Linux a try! There are a ton of excellent ressources online for learning about Linux, how to make it your own (a practice commonly called ‘ricing’), or fix errors you may encounter. These are explored further in the links below :)

1. Picking a distro. What I hear is that, unless you have some problematic hardware it doesn’t really matter what you pick. So if it feels overwhelming, don’t stress too much over if it’s the “right one”, you can always try different ones out. Having said that, my impression is, many coming from Windows seem to be happy with ‘Mint’. Likewise ‘Bazzite’ seems popular as of late. But ‘Pop_Os!’, ‘Debian’ or ‘Fedora’, are also all perfectly valid choices. Personally I’ve liked using Endeavour OS with KDE, for quite a while.

2. Software. There’s so much cool software out there, so maybe search around for which can solve your needs. I like browsing Flathub.org or blogs, such as, Phoronix to discover new software. There might also be a discovery feature in the distro itself. Both Firefox (and its derivatives such as LibreWolf) and Chromium (along with its derivatives: Chrome, Brave, etc.) runs well. Even the much smaller project: LadyBird, does so. I have no experience with music production software on Linux, so cannot comment on that.

3. Games. Might depend on which types of games you play. But to me it seems Steam (using Proton/Wine), Heroic Games Launcher, and Lutris, works great. The steamdb as others mention is also a super ressource!

If you made it this far through my wall of text, I’m delighted by your curiousity. Two Linux “introductory videos” I’d like to share are respectively from Nick@thelinuxEXP Linux isn’t (just) better, it’s also more FUN! and Brodie Robertson’s Linux Resources Every New Linux User Needs Odysee YouTube

Like everyone else is mentioning, Organic Maps is probably an excellent option.

Personally, I also rather like Magic Earth, although it’s sadly not FOSS. But it does have crowd sourced traffic info, and imo a better search ux.

I think it’s an interesting project. However I am not a fan of their decision to omit forward secrecy, and have thus passed on using it. At least for now.