I think you need to go commercial recovery. If it was a file you accidentally deleted, that can easily be recovered, but you wrote directly to the device.
Gaming on Linux is great, steam isn't porting games for SteamOS, instead they released Proton which allows you to play just about every Windows game without issue.
I don't know about LibreOffice supporting Excel Macros, I'd assume not.
There are many good mail programs, but I think only one that properly integrates with Microsoft's cloud stuff.
Visual Studio straight up runs on Linux, it should be familiar.
Try it out and see if you get your system how you want it :)
This is clickbait. tl;dr a guy released MIT-licensed software, Microsoft forked and renamed it as they're legally allowed to do. Hell they could even close the source and sell it if they wanted to.
Endeavour, it's pretty nice for gaming and different in some ways. I continue to run Debian stable on all my other machines. I really hated where Ubuntu has gone with snap and terminal ads, yet I still recommend it for people. My dream would be for Mint to make a KDE version instead of cinnamon, although I'd probably stick with Endeavour for myself.
I do want to see the content and community, just once though. I don't even mean the same story being posted multiple times, but I think I see the exact same post multiple times.
There really aren't that many cheaters in SC2. I've really only ran into 3 that I know of in 14 years. The funny thing is I still beat them too! Cheaters in SC2 are usually just bad at the game even with their cheats because they don't understand the fundamentals, they can't multitask, they can't do a clean build, they can't watch the minimap. Here's the last one I hit a year ago with timestamped evidence: https://youtu.be/KNo1xsnRAXI?t=1042
Kubuntu is a good choice for a first timer, I ran it for years. KDE is easy to use and beautiful, and it's easily themeable including the mouse cursor. You don't really need to use the terminal if you don't want to, but sometimes it's the easiest way to do something when you just need to copy and paste a command from a website. It's nothing to be afraid of or hate. It looks like Proton VPN does have Linux packages, although they're all for the Gnome desktop. You can still install and use it KDE, the only issue is it might look a little different from your other KDE apps. Installing Linux is easier than installing Windows these days, you won't fuck it up :) The way software updates work is better than on Windows; it works a bit more like the app store on your phone: You install all your software from the repositories (the app store) and then you get updates to all of them and the whole system at the same time. You can always decide whether to update or not, but there's really no reason not to. Free software and Linux software are generally designed for users rather than to make companies money, so new versions typically bring security fixes, new features, and improved performance instead of "features" nobody asked for. As a plus, you can always go read a real changelog to find out what's new rather than the lame "minor improvements" cop out we see elsewhere.
My advice to everyone curious like you is to not worry so much and just dive in! Lots of things could go wrong, but lots of things could also go right!
I've always heard that there are people or companies who do nothing but trademark fancy-sounding product names and then sell them to car and drug manufacturers. I read it on the internet so it must be true.
For desktop use, the biggest thing as of late has been compromised flatpak's or appimages. Like others have said Linux users are usually more technical but more importantly we install almost all of our software from trusted repositories instead of exe's from random websites. Flatpak and appimage brings the bad security hygiene of Windows to Linux. Honorable mention goes to typosquatting programming libraries, but that mostly affects developers and not normal desktop users.
Hey OP, consider using $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR instead of /tmp. It's now the more proper place for these kinds of things to avoid permission issues, although I'm sure you're on a single user system like most people. I have clipboard actions set to download with yt-dlp :)
My favorite aliases are:
alias dff='findmnt -D -t nosquashfs,notmpfs,nodevtmpfs,nofuse.portal,nocifs,nofuse.kio-fuse'
I think you need to go commercial recovery. If it was a file you accidentally deleted, that can easily be recovered, but you wrote directly to the device.