I own a OnePlus 6 with postmarketOS. My daily driver is a Pixel 7 with CalyxOS and microg turned off.

Despite having effectively only FOSS apps on my Android daily driver, I can’t daily drive postmarketOS. It’s making great progress, but isn’t nearly stable enough as a modern smartphone, and several other issues hold it back;

• Sleep states. Currently you get to choose between your phone going to sleep (~ a day battery life) but without notifications, incoming calls, alarms, etc. Or your phone “staying awake”, where you’ll have those features but only ~4 hours battery.
• Hardware video decoding, which “can work” but only in select apps, and they’re not great for mobile.
• Audio issues, such as no audio from the earpiece, microphone not working, or no audio at all.

If you rely on non-foss Android apps, there is Waydroid, but it’s not a perfect solution and might have issues.

It’s not a “waste of money” if you want a device to experiment or tinker with, or if you want to follow progress of Linux mobile, but it is extremely unlikely to replace your daily driver.

Mint under the hood is still Linux, but for basic tasks like webbrowsing, it’s very similar to or easier than Windows.

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Article doesn’t even cite their sources correctly, typo-ing “Bringus Studios” as “Dingus Studios”

Probably, yes. Dual-booting may also be an option for the one or two games that don’t work.

Not every game works, but as another user pointed out, ProtonDB is a good resource. If you buy a new game on Steam, and it doesn’t work, you can refund it within the first 2 weeks (and below 2 hours playtime) for any reason. That includes “Ths game does not work on my operating system”.

Try WiVRN, it’s not built on SteamVR, and doesn’t have the same issues SteamVR does. You can get it through a flatpak or by using Envision, as described on the LVRA wiki.

I don’t play VRChat myself, but I have to disagree. I’m in several Linux VR groups, and the general sentiment is that it’s not as easy to set up, but works well for the more popular games, including VRChat. This is similar to my experience. There’s good resources (like LVRA) to help people set things up, or when they’re running into issues. I’m also not saying VR on Linux is flawless, far from it, but to describe it as just “scuffed” without context doesn’t explain the whole state of it.

• AMD Drivers: Good news! They work even better on Linux. Bad news, you’re probably referring to the AMD “control panel” type application instead of the drivers themselves, which doesn’t have a direct equivalent. The drivers should come pre-installed, though depening on distro you may need to select/install “radv” or “vulkan-radeon” manually. Most of the control panel functionality can be found in other applications, like OBS for recording or CoreCtrl for clock speeds.
• Chrome: Although Firefox is pre-installed in most cases, you have full freedom of choice here. Most people find that Firefox works basically the same after using it for a bit, but if it doesn’t fit you, there’s other options. Google Chrome is most likely available in your distros app store, but there’s also less “spying” options like ungoogled-chromium.
• Gmail: You can access this on the website, or through a mail client like thunderbird. You can switch if you want to, you’re not limited by any means here.
• Office 360: Though LibreOffice is a great alternative, some find themselves forced to use MS office for compatibility reasons. This is still possible, buy only in a webbrowser.
• ITunes: This is a hard one to find alternatives for, depending on what you use it for. For managing iPhones from a PC, you essentially need Windows or macOS. For playing music, there’s plenty of options.
• JBL: I’m unsure as I don’t use any of their products, but assuming you mean audio related “control panels”, there’s many options available. Though they may need a bit of tweaking and searching around to get things to sound the way you want.
• Musescore: I also don’t use this, but it’s available on Flathub, meaning you can (and probably should) use your distros “App Store” to install this.
• Norton AV: Not many AVs targeting Linux exist, and they’re not the greatest quality. Though it’s doable to go without one, as long as you don’t download and run random files off the internet. Stick to the app store, and you should be totally fine.
• PyCharm: This is available on Linux, also in the “app store”. There’s other IDEs available too, like vscode.
• Remote Desktop to iOS: I haven’t owned an iOS device since 2019, so I don’t know which protocol they use. It’s possible this isn’t supported at all.
• Star Citizen: It looks like this is playable through Proton. You can use Steam (add non-steam game), Lutris, or Bottles to launch non-steam Windows apps/games.
• Steam: Works great
• VPN: As you didn’t put a previous VPN provider here, I’m not able to tell you if it works on Linux. Personally I have a hard time recommending any VPN service, but Mullvad stands out as being the least untrustworthy. Almost all others like Nord, Express, etc. share some common traits that make them very untrustworthy to me.
• Windows Games: This is a bit more complicated. Games from the Microsoft Store are very unlikely to run, and require messing about to even try in the first place. Other games made for Windows likely work (even outside Steam), using management tools like Lutris or Bottles is often easier than manually using Wine.

If a tool (or distro) works well for you, it’s a good option. Everyone has different opinions on the “best” distro, but since it’s very subjective, there is no single “best” distro. There’s only 2 distros I recommend against, that’s Ubuntu (and close spin-offs) and Manjaro, because they have major objective downsides compared to equivalents like Mint or Endeavour. The distros I generally recommend to new users are Mint and Fedora, but feel free to look around, you’re not forced to pick a specific one.

You noted you were likely going to choose Linux Mint, great! It’s a “stable” distro, as in, it doesn’t change much with small updates. Instead, new release versions (23, 24, 25, etc) come with new changes. Linux Mint comes with an App Store that can install from Flathub, which should be the first place to check for installing new applications.

As for VR, it depends heavily on which exact headset you have, and is not always a great experience on Linux right now (speaking from experience with an Index). The LVRA wiki is a great starting place: https://lvra.gitlab.io/. If you’re on a Quest, WiVRN and ALVR exist, though they both have their own downsides. If you’re on a PCVR headset from Oculus, your options are more limited. You might also want to consider a different distro, as VR development is moving very fast. Many VR users choose to go with a “harder” rolling release distribution, like EndeavourOS, to receive feature updates quicker.

Also of note, if you have the storage space, you can choose to “dual boot” (even with just one drive). This will give you a menu to choose between Windows and Linux when starting your computer, and will give you time to move stuff over. I generally recommend this, as it provides an option to immediately do a task you know how to do on Windows, when it’s absolutely required to do the task asap.

I have used Waydroid, mainly with FOSS apps, and although it has some rough edges, it does often work for just having one or two Android apps functionality.

Linux on mobile as a whole isn’t daily driver ready yet in my opinion. I’ve only tried pmOS on a OP6, but that seems to be a leading project on a well-supported phone (compared to the rest).

1. The main fundamental differences are the package manager, the way the system is setup (partitons, immutable distros), and possibly software you don’t want installed. Aside from that, you can install basically anything on any distro. Some do make it easier than others to install new things though.
2. Canonical (Ubuntu and direct spinoffs) and Manjaro are the ones I recommend avoiding, because their marketing and “general sentiment” goes against my opinions of the distros/maintainers. However, switching Linux distros (especially to another one with a similar base) is not nearly as daunting of a task as switching from Windows to Linux. Some corporate distro owners might pull something like advertising, but there’s often an easy way out (except with snaps).
3. As for the distros you mentioned, Fedora, Mint, and Pop!_OS are all good options. Mint and Pop!_OS are both based on Ubuntu, which could cause issues in the future, but Mint is working on a Linux Mint Debian Edition. Aside from that, my general recommendation is to stay close to upstream. Distros further downstream tend to break more often (think spinoffs of Ubuntu, Arch derivatives, forks of Fedora, etc). There are exceptions to this rule, like when a distro stays close to upstream.
4. In recent times, it should all be working okay! We’re “in the middle of a long time switch” from X11 to Wayland. Those are protocols for the way applications display to the screen. X11 is lacking features, like HDR, and can have issues with “weird” multimonitor setups. Wayland is being actively developed, multimonitor works fine, and HDR is available for some desktop environments (like KDE or GNOME). Not all distros default (or support) Wayland yet, so if you need HDR, pick a distro with KDE or GNOME as its desktop environment.
5. This situation has gotten more complex with Wayland (one of the pain points still being worked on). The features you get partially depend on which DE (or wayland compositor) you choose. Previously on X11, this wasn’t the case. For Wayland DEs, KDE is moving relatively fast, with new features nearly every release. GNOME is moving slower, but should cover most people’s needs. As for tinkering around with your choice of UI/DE, there’s many options available, but KDE offers by far the easiest customization possible (it’s all in the settings menu). There’s more complex, more customizable options available, but I wouldn’t recommend them as a starting point.
6. As for nvidia, it has been progressively getting better, but there are still nvidia specific issues that come up from time to time. There’s not really much you can do about it, aside from following changelogs and updating when the thing you’re running into is fixed.

Now for your list of applications:

• Gaming (through steam) works great! There’s definitely still issues, but I’d argue there’s not really more issues than on Windows, just different issues. There is one category of games that’s still problematic, games with kernel level anticheat. They do not and likely will never play on Linux. Other launchers (EA Play, Ubisoft Connect, Epic) can have their own issues, although there’s often fixes/workarounds available rather quickly.
• Firefox works just fine on Linux.
• VLC works great too, although there are other options available that are more modern or better in some ways. It’s up to you to decide what to use.
• Spotify works just fine, there’s always the website in case nothing else works, but the “app” as a flatpak or even through repos works too.
• Discord has some issues accepting that Linux exists, but have recently started making some changes with that. Most people either use Disocrd in the webbrowser (to prevent too much system access), or run a custom client like Vesktop.
• Godot works great on Linux, I don’t have much else to say about it tbh.
• Visual Studio Code too, it’s basically just a webapp. Some integrations might be slightly different (like the terminal), but otherwise stuff “just works”.
• Git was quite literally made for Linux first (as a project, but also as a platform to run on).
• Photoshop is going to be difficult to get running, if it works at all. You can certainly try, but it might be a good option to find an alternative for this one.
• Audacity works great
• Davinci Resolve does have a Linux version, but the free version can be picky about codecs. There’s always tools to reencode your inputs, but it’s not always convenient drag and drop.
• Misc. tinkering is going to be much more fun, as things in Linux ecosystems are often open source. Not only can you mess around with tools that already exist, you can edit them, or even make your own. Some “niche” hardware might give you issues (like iirc the goxlr, or some capture cards).

virt-manager only requires access to the libvirtd socket, as long as the flatpak.has that as default configuration (which I imagine would be the case), there’s zero difference beteween flatpak and native.

Lead dev of grapheneos is extremely toxic in communication. I don’t trust someone like that developing the software running on a phone.

EDIT: This comment seems to be particularly controversial, with many people praising GrapheneOS as a project, while ignoring the developers views and actions. Although my opinion of the main developer is negative, the project itself and its goals are great. To clear up some confusion, I want to add to my previous statement:

At first, this seems like the standard “separating art from the artist”, however, GrapheneOS is a ton of code, not just art. When it comes to other forms of art, like literature or paintings, an artist maliciously hiding their personal beliefs in their otherwise “unbiased” work might degrade the quality of the final result, but does not have much significant impact outside of that. When it comes to code, programs, OSes, this changes. The artist (programmer) changing their art (code) based on their personal beliefs is not just a degradation in quality, but a security risk for anyone running the code and trusting the developer. Having seen the way the GOS dev speaks about its community and even people in support of him (see Louis Rossman’s video), it becomes clear that the mentioned “risk” of malware is very much present. Like many others, I don’t have the time to verify the source code of an entire Android rom myself, which means I would have to trust the GOS dev to not insert anything malicious, after the statements he’s made. I’d have to trust him after he’s grouped a majority of his community into “people who are after him and are swatting him”. It’s a very real possibility that someone with beliefs like that would add malicious code to his project, and I’m personally not willing to run that risk.

Please note that I am not encouraging people to “go harass the dev”, that is an immoral action nobody should be doing. I am trying to inform people of the developers behavior online, past and current, so they can make a decision for themselves whether to run his software on their personal devices.