I miss old Gnome. I wish they'd stuck with the old Gnome 2 design philosophy but breathed new modern design principals into it, instead of trying to go the Ubuntu Unity route. Maybe something like Cinnamon but even more flexible and feature-rich.
If you want to use VSCode without the Microsoft bits, they actually provide that officially. VSCodium is VSCode with all the Microsoft-specific bits stripped out (or rather, not added in in the first place, at compile time). It's all open source too so you can either verify yourself or have a knowledgeable friend do an audit on your behalf.
I use VSCode at work a lot and enjoy it quite a bit. A good alternative would be to use Kate/Kwrite with all of the coding plugins and the linter plugins turned on, the experience is pretty close to VSCode/ium without store extensions.
For those of us that expect room to breathe and make our machine work for us rather than the other way around, we feel like Gnome takes a lot of liberties away for the sake of "simplicity." There is so much missing from Gnome that is present in most other DEs and even custom WM setups.
The primary contributors who work under The Gnome Foundation also come off as controlling and arrogant in a lot of cases, and refuse to take community feedback to heart, whereas KDE has literal summits to get user feedback on major core features we want to see which then later get added to their backlogs and sprints as Epics. Gnome acts a lot like Apple in the sense that they're very much "we know what's best for you better than you do."
Now, the singular area I can give Gnome true props in is their accessibility functionality, but that's primarily it. KDE's accessibility is fairly behind by about a decade in comparison.
They didn't care about what people who bought the Wii U copies of games felt. Almost every major wii u title became a Switch title instead.
Needless to say, when my friends started hitting me up to play Mario kart 8, I was very pissed that i had to explain to them that they couldn't play with me because i already had it in its original format and they didn't. I had to go rebuy it for switch later down the road.
AMD drivers: use the built-in MESA drivers that include the official AMD support.
Gmail: ProtonMail for the service, Kmail for the desktop client.
Chrome: Firefox, or Librewolf if you care about privacy.
Office365: LibreOffice for full FOSS or OnlyOfficr for less freedom but more comfort.
iTunes: depends entirely on what you use it for, but I buy my music mostly off of BandCamp these days.
MuseScore: MuseScore
Norton: Why were you using Norton in the first place? It's practically a virus itself. If you need an antivirus on Linux, you might want ClamAV/ClamTK for something that runs locally only, or Microsoft Defender for Linux.
Py-Charm: Py-Charm, VSCode, Vim, Kate/KWrite
Remote Desktop to iOS: I got nothin'
Star Citizen: Star Citizen
Steam: Steam
VPN: Wireguard
Windows Games: install locally using Wine and then add to Steam as a non-Steam game to use Proton for better support.
Windows 10: run it in a VM if you still need it, or keep it on a separate SSD and dual boot into that.
After completing the challenge and making sure your system is usable and can survive a reboot:
If you've kept the old package manager, search for installed packages and make sure that the package manager itself is the only thing left. Then delete it.
The beauty of this exercise is you can make it as easy or challenging as you want just by changing the targets, and finding different combinations can keep things interesting.
As other commenters have said, its about as strenuous as doing two normal installs.
However, if you want to do this challenge but feel guilty about the consumed resources, consider donating to the two distros you are performing this with to cover any additional service costs. In all likelihood it'll only cost them fractions of pennies, but any reason to donate to FOSS is always appreciated.
I miss old Gnome. I wish they'd stuck with the old Gnome 2 design philosophy but breathed new modern design principals into it, instead of trying to go the Ubuntu Unity route. Maybe something like Cinnamon but even more flexible and feature-rich.