If you want to stop endless troubleshooting, switch to Linux.

Their authoritarian dystopia is preferable to the American nazi parties fascist idiocracy

No, it really isn’t. Neither is preferable. The reason why the American system seems incredibly bad right now is because everyone in the West is accustomed to the kind of liberty we’ve enjoyed for a long time. So when that changes we see the contrast around us very sharply.

But don’t kid yourself that China is better. In fact, the Chinese system is the direction that America is heading towards and starting to emulate.

People in China can’t even say a single negative word against Xi, and if they do it online whatever they post gets deleted within minutes and the person gets a knock at the door, often not being heard from ever again.

And that’s simply not the case in the US currently. Sure you get the news story about people being turned away at the border for having said something about Trump online, or getting locked up by ICE for a few months (that’s an insane reality, don’t get me wrong). But ultimately these people are the exception… for now.

At least the CCP value science and education.

The German Nazis also valued Science and education. That doesn’t mean anything in the long run.

ps: I know someone will accuse me of violating Godwin’s law here, but it’s literally relevant since we’re talking about actual Nazis

A part of my brain always reads AI as Al (yes, those are two different letters). As in Albert.

So it’s generative Albert. And “Albert is increasingly using more power”.

The Galaxy S series and the Pixel devices cost about the same tbh

So? That’s not what the person you replied was even saying. You completely missed the point of their comment.

looking at things i think i meamt Only Office. Any opinions there?

If I remember correctly, Only Office uses LibreOffice as its core and then adds or changes default stuff. I might be wrong about that. But ultimately I hear positive things about Only Office.

The hosting is on my old desktop which is running server 2016. I’d like to replace the OS on it too. I don’t keep the box online so I’m not keen on using it for anything other than game servers.

Sounds like a perfect situation for loading something like Proxmox and then visualizing the Windows Server 2016 instance. You would basically have the exact same functionality but with way more options like cloning and backing up the server.

Appreciate you not going aggro on me over it.

No worries at all. I think the automatic defensiveness from Linux people comes from old misconceptions being repeated often. Or sometimes it comes from how something is read and interpreted. Someone might say “I can’t switch because I need XYZ”, to which a very literal response is “you can use ABC which does the same thing, so you can switch”. When what the first person meant is "I can’t switch because I prefer XYZ", which is a completely valid reason.

I wasn’t going to berate you or anything. I was genuinely curious.

I am going to be trying out libreoffice and OpenOffice

LibreOffice is great. I use it on my work system at a medium to larger sized company (every single other person uses o365). I haven’t heard anyone complain yet about doc comparability and I haven’t had any issues myself.

Stay away from OpenOffice. It’s practically a dead product. When Oracle bought OpenOffice, the community forked the project which became LibreOffice. LibreOffice is where all the development and community focus and effort has gone since.

OneNote is my second most vital

I don’t have any recommendations here. I’ve never really found a “perfect” solution for this. Currently I use a few different solutions, but it’s all centred around markdown, so they’re all interchangeable.

OneDrive is probably my most vital.

I personally wouldn’t touch OneDrive with a hundred meter pole. MS does so much screwing around with your data that you can never be sure if the data stored is what you uploaded. They’ve been known to just up and delete files they scan and think is malicious, even if it’s a false positive. Then they’re known to scan all your documents for everything, including potential passwords, then use those passwords to open password-protected files and then scan them also.

Then there’s the situation from a year or so ago where they automatically switched everyone’s documents folder to a “cloud first” folder, where they just auto-uploaded everyone’s local files, deleted the local copies, and did it all without user consent or even informing users. And this resulted in all kinds of wild crap like people not having access to their documents because they were offline and were expecting local files. Then some people had their metered data connection getting maxed out. While others couldn’t even modify their files or even save a file to their “My Documents” folder because the default storage allocation was far less than the total data of their local files. So effectively the data was held for ransom.

it’s mostly running dedicated game servers that have no Linux option.

Most newer games that you can run your own dedicated server will almost certainly have a Linux option, which suggests you might taking about older games, in which case something like Lutris (Wine) might be an option.

But are you hosting these game servers on your desktop?

I have an Mvidia card (drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux).

They haven’t been for a while now. On some newer distros they’ll install the Nvidia drivers at the same time as the OS itself.

Nvidia GPUs are not good in Linux at the moment

They’ve been perfectly fine for years. And now they’ve never been better for desktop DEs.

What kind of things are holding you back?