Linux

Debian probably

Sounds like a pihole on your network would solve all of your issues.

pretty done with Bill’s fetishes about bing and ai.

I agree with all your points, but Bill Gates has no agency on the company's decisions these days. Blame Satya.

as for video editing, i've been using flowblade recently, it's been pretty good for putting together more basic edits.

You should install it using flatpak and only update when you have no more active projects (for the moment it seems updates partially break older saves)

pcmanfm has been pretty solid, i really recommend learning CLI file management though, it's universal and super convenient for the basic things.

I'm not a graphics designer and idk any of the graphics related apps you listed except gimp but everything should work fine as long as it have a native Linux version. You may need to replace Davinci with something else though because it can be a pain to get working on Linux.

For distros, I'd recommend Mint because it's just pretty much the most beginner-friendly one you can get and it's quite conservative but it has very old drivers so performance may not be the best, EndeavourOS (based on Arch btw but quite stable) if you have very very recent hardware or if you want newest performance optimizations (driver versions) and Pop!_OS if you have an NVidia GPU. I wouldn't recommend Fedora or Ubuntu because the first one rushes major bleeding edge changes (including AI) and the second one is known for some questionable choices (including ads and pushing proprietary app stores with poor moderation).

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Resolve works on on linix but make sure you check that your codecs are supported.