this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I rarely distro hop. I used Linux Mint for a solid decade. I've made the jump to Fedora KDE pretty much entirely because Wayland support is the farthest along here, and that enables me to use more features of my hardware such as two monitors at different refresh rates, Freesync, etc. I did come to the conclusion awhile back that there's a lot of pointless distros out there, a lot of them are just "I want this particular permutation of default software."
Assuming you're currently a Windows user, I think the main issue you're going to face using Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition for "programming" is going to be general culture shocks. Using a package manager instead of heading to the browser, stuff like that. "Light gaming" depending on what you mean by that could be no trouble at all or dealing with some hiccups involving Nvidia's imperfect support. There are some games that require proprietary anti-cheat that doesn't support Linux, Valorant is one of those that springs to mind.
Difficult question to concisely answer; Mint has a system they call "Spices" which include a series of applets and widgets you can add to the UI, choose them from a menu and then configure them. One of these is "Cinnemenu" which replaces the default Menu with a somewhat more customizable one, though you might struggle to exactly replicate the WIndows look and feel. Beyond that, you might look at Conky for your desktop customizing needs.
File extensions do exist in the Linux world but they're not as important for making things work as it is on Windows. Some files, particularly executable binaries, won't have extensions at all. A text editor might not automatically append .txt to a plaintext file, because it doesn't want to assume you're not writing a bash script or config file or something. But if you record a sound clip with Audacity or something it'll add a .wav or whatever extension as appropriate.
Bonus: You probably mean Neofetch (or whatever we're using since the developer of Neofetch has "gone farming"). Those are hard-coded into Neofetch by its developer.