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.
I’m glad you found success in using Linux Mint, some of your issues may be due to using an older/more conservative operating system distribution.
For installing difficult software it might be helpful to see if they have a docker container or some sort so you can install the correct dependencies because Mint repositories might not have them in the exact form, you can also spin up your own container via https://distrobox.it/
Also XFCE’s age has been more apparent each year. It relies on a lot of older GNOME components and the team is pretty small. I recommend using GNOME or KDE (neither of which are offered by Mint so you’ll have to go to Fedora for that) though this is just a suggestion to keep at the back of your mind if it’s working for you currently and you’re still getting your feet wet.