Why do you think that it doesn’t use AI? It uses Wndows’ own OCR APIs, requiring Windows language packs for support for different scripts & languages. OCR has used AI for a long time now.

kAppIcon is a small icon manager for KDE Plasma and other freedesktop desktops.

According to the Readme, yes.

I didn’t look too deeply, but I assume it modifies .desktop files stored in $XDG_DATA_HOME/applications/ and/or copies system.desktop files there to override them with modified versions.

If it works like I assume, it should work with anything that reads .desktop files from the standard locations.

Thanks! I’ll give swaylock another chance. I’m currently moving back to sway from the Hypr* ecosystem.

How much do sway{,lock}-effects add to the experience?

How did you rice swaylock? Would you mind sharing your config?

As others have already noted, the handbook is very good. You should be able to manage with limited Linux & terminal skills. (terminal navigation, can install a package with e.g. apt, etc.)

If you’re unsure about your skills, try using the terminal a bit. You can start with switching to the apt cli (command-line program) if you’re using a gui client. Or, you could try to do some basic, everyday tasks with it, like editing text with nano (or vim, if you’re feeling brave).

Just don’t forget to install important packages when installing Gentoo, like sudo (and add youself to sudoers), a DE/WM (KDE Plasma, GNOME, Sway, etc.) and a terminal. These things can be done later, by rebooting to the install media and chrooting, but it can be a bit annoying.

Don’t worry too much about mistakes, as everything is fixable, except things related to bad UEFI implementations.

Like others, I would recommend going with defaults for now. You can always tinker after the install. While a few things are a real pain to change or shouldn’t be changed, like going from no-multilib to multilib, most things can be played with later. Though I haven’t done it with a Gentoo system specifically, going from an unencypted system to encrypting all disks is very much possible.

1. I’ve heard good things about CUPS for printing, not sure about the wd drive app & msi dragon center.
2. Not really, with exceptions:

• Appimages are a Linux equivalent of Windows’ EXE files. Everything the program requires to run is contained in a single file, which can be run anywhere.
• Statically linked applications, for example, a lot of software written in Rust & Go, also include everything needed to run, but in a different, more compact way.
• Not what you want or mean, but source-based distributions, like Gentoo do not distribute ready-to-run software*, but rather scripts/instructions for building for source in an automatic manner. This decouples the file you get from your distribution from the required library versions somewhat, in a way, increasing backwards compatibility a bit.

3. You can, although you should use the system’s package manager, if possible. You can just download an appimage or a statically linked executable and give it the executable permission (chmod +x <path-to-program>) and run the file.
4. First, beware that Wine is malware compatible! Wine — upon which Valve’s Proton is based — can be used to run Windows programs & games on Linux (and MacOS). Alternatively, you can use umu-launcher to launch non-steam programs with Proton. If you encounter problems with Wine, you could try looking into the Lutris launcher, winetricks & the winedb website.
5. You ask multiple things here: 5.1. Flag emojis: Yes, so long as you have fonts with them installed. (They probably are on Ubuntu) Flag emojis are interesting that they’re just 2 special characters, representing a country code. If you have a font that specifies a flag for a country with the code “FR”, you get support for the French flag emoji. There is also nothing stopping a font from including flag emojis for fictional or historical flags. 5.2 Codecs: Yup, HEVC (H.265) and others are supported at no cost. FFmpeg supports it, so you can transcode video on Linux. Just be aware of the quality loss from lossy->lossy conversion.
6. Yes, Wine works offline.
7. See points 2 & 3. Also, if you have a package file (.deb for Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu), you can use the package manager to install it. Well, so long as you have its dependencies either installed or as package files stored offline. You can also run a repository offline, but that’s probably not really useful to you. Be aware that you should assume package files to be distro-specific, unless otherwise specified. (A .deb file without dependencies could run on both Debian & Ubuntu. If I remember, EndeavourOS uses Arch’s repositories, so it should be compatible with Arch.)
8. Yes, Wine can run .bat files. Wine contains a terminal program (windecmd or winecommand I think), which works like a windows command prompt window.

_{*With exceptions}

If you have other questions or if anything remains unclear, ask away!

Isn’t 300lb approximately equal to 1 stackoverflow user?

(I’m not USAian, so my conversion may have higher error bars than usual)

AVX-512, so x86? AVX (Advanced Vector Exrensions) is the name of the vector extensions to x86, right?