This was… a lot easier than I expected…? It was obviously a good idea to back up all my files, make sure I had access to all my most important accounts on my phone, and make sure that I had the latest version of Mint Xfce on the bootable USB, but I was so worried about doing something slightly wrong and breaking my computer that I just feel kinda silly now that I know everything just kinda works.
Well, everything except two things: firstly, it’s gonna be a pain to set up my custom Russian keyboard; secondly, RVC seems like a pain in the ass to install, but we’ll see if it’s the type of pain in the ass I can deal with in the span of six days, and it’s no huge deal if it isn’t.
Edit: I had some trouble getting it to connect to my TV via HDMI. The solution turned out to be to switch back to the open source display driver instead of Nvidia’s proprietary one LMFAO
Edit 2: Tumblerd kept me from safely ejecting my external hard drive; I ended up just terminating Tumblerd through the task manager, and that fixed the problem. Tumblerd is evidently just a thingy that generates thumbnails for files and it got stubck because it was a big hard drive with hundreds of video files.
Edit 3: I’ve got trackpad gestures working more or less like they did on Windows. Hooray.
Edit 4: I’ve got the Japanese IME (Mozc) set up and added em dash and interrobang among a few other special characters to the custom dictionary.
It depends on distro but you should be able to go to settings, keyboard, then under special character entry or a similar named category bind compose key to something you remember. Then you can compose characters, it’s much better than Windows alt codes which is what I used before. ? + ! = ⸘, ! + ? = ‽