It's very new. Previously the system would just drop to a console with a message saying "Kernel panic: not syncing: [reason]" and a whole bunch of debug info.

But still, on a well-maintained system, that pretty much never happens. Mainly because Linux is significantly more resilient to faults in device drivers than Windows.

Damn Small Linux is a recently resurrected distro made specifically to run on old 32-bit PCs. You probably won't be doing much web browsing or gaming on this device, but you should at least be able to get it to function

Debian! It's stable, elegant, and doesn't impede customization. I distro-hopped a lot over the years - some that I ended up disliking included KaOS (severely limited software repository), Clear Linux (only way to get ffmpeg was to compile it from source) and Fedora (very slow); most I liked, and just decided to move on at some point. But I kept coming back to Debian, and eventually got to a point where instead of trying a different distro when Debian broke, I would just reinstall Debian.

I'd be interested to try VanillaOS or another "immutable" distro at some point in the future. See if they've matured enough for my day-to-day use.

First, go to [three dots] -> Preferences -> Runners -> Proton, click the button next to the newest available version of Proton GE (currently ge-proton-9-7), and wait for it to download.

Then, go to your bottle -> Settings -> Runner, set the runner to ge-proton-[version], and wait for Bottles to configure the new runner.

Have you tried using different runners? According to ProtonDB Ape Out is completely supported by Proton, so maybe try a Proton runner instead of Wine.

Could you describe the issue in more detail, then? What happens when you try to play a video? If you get any error messages, please copy them.

It might not be Wayland-related at all.

I just tried installing Parole on my own KDE Plasma+Wayland system and it just works, aside from opening an external playback window, which feels a bit weird, but I'm assuming it's normal. The only display drivers available are X, but the "Automatic" pick works.

If it doesn't work for you, make sure xwayland is installed.

My second distro was Debian 8, initially with LXDE (which has barely changed at all since then, so it's still nostalgic) then later switching to KDE Plasma 4. I probably hold the most nostalgia for it, even more than I do for my first distro (Linux Mint 17). For a while I was into Plasma Netbook, which I find to be an especially weird, nostalgic product of its time, and the Oxygen theme in general is probably my favorite default look for any DE.

I'm working on possibly outdated second-hand information, so maybe it isn't happening anymore. I haven't been dual booting since ~2018 and even then I basically never used Windows.

There isn't an alsa command on my system either, so that's no surprise. But we'll need more information to track down the cause, such as:

• What (sound) hardware are you using? (try lspci | grep Audio)
• What happens when you try to play a sound? Does it get stuck loading / at 0:00, show an error, or just play silently?
• Is your system using pulseaudio directly, or via pipewire? (try pactl info)
• What shows up in pavucontrol? (Is it detecting your speaker, or just "dummy output"? Is sound muted, and can you unmute?) Try also alsamixer.
• If you installed non-free firmware, you should have a few lines like deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free-firmware in the file /etc/apt/sources.list. If non-free-firmware is not present, then obviously you have no non-free firmware.

Currently Elisa for my digital music library, and for individual files I prefer to use VLC. I've had good experiences with Strawberry Music Player (and its predecessor, Clementine), too, and am thinking of switching back to it. And when I was a GNOME user, I preferred Lollipop.

1. I believe there is still an issue with Windows deleting Linux bootloaders during some updates. You'll be fine if you install Linux on a separate disk, and even if you dual-boot on one disk and the bootloader gets deleted, there are ways to recover it. You don't strictly need to have separate data and OS partitions, and I've gone back and forth on whether I prefer it - it makes distro hopping and disk encryption easier, at the cost of potentially inefficient use of space and serious consequences if your OS partition fills up.
2. Disk encryption is very straightforward if you use separate OS and data partitions. You literally just tick a box during the install and enter an extra password. It won't upset Windows any more than a normal install does (i.e. Windows might think it's corrupted, but won't do anything without your input). With one partition for everything, it's still possible, but the encryption will be much weaker and handled by the bootloader in a somewhat clunkier way, and I'm not sure if Mint even supports that setup.
3. I don't have much experience with this myself, and certainly not on Linux Mint, so I'll leave this one to other commenters.
4. Synaptic is just a fancy frontend to APT, and I think Mint also has something called mintInstall, which was just an apt frontend back when I used it, but I think it also supports Flatpak now. It's entirely up to personal preference as to which UI you prefer. I do recommend you set up Flathub if it's not there by default, as it gives you access to a ton of useful apps that can't be packaged by Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint for various reasons.
5. Don't download software from random websites unless it's absolutely necessary. Chances are, their version either won't work well, if at all, or will break your system. Try APT first, Flatpak second, everything else is a last resort option. If a program you used on Windows doesn't have a (working, native) Linux version, try finding and learning to use an alternative that is in the APT repositories before downloading the Windows version and using it on Wine. Back up your most important files from Windows before installing Linux in dual boot, just in case you make a mistake somewhere. To answer the last question, stick to the default terminal emulator and Firefox installation unless there's a feature you really want in another one; the distro's developers picked them for a reason, after all.