Seven angles over the 185 programs actually installed on this machine converge on one thing the per-app tables don’t show: the decision is the desktop environment, not the applications. Two angles reached KDE Plasma independently and for unrelated reasons. Plasma 6.7 is the only shell with native per-monitor panels, per-screen wallpaper, arbitrary fractional scaling and per-screen ICC profiles — it even shipped per-screen virtual desktops after a 21-year-old request, beating Windows outright [1]. Separately, the automation angle landed on KDE or GNOME because global hotkeys and clipboard monitoring now route through xdg-desktop-portal, and wlroots-based compositors implement that unevenly [2]. And this must be a Wayland migration, not a soft landing on X11: GNOME 50 removed the X11 session in March 2026 [3] and Plasma 6.8 removes it in October [4].
Both expected blockers evaporated. The corporate VPNs are fine — Harmony SASE ships a first-party Linux agent [5] and WatchGuard itself documents connecting via a stock OpenVPN client with the Firebox profile [6]. The anti-cheat wall isn’t in this library: Fall Guys is recorded as Works [7] and Planetfall is Deck-Playable [8]. Two angles corrected that premise independently.
What breaks is administration and shell integration, not applications. Every authoring tool has a Linux answer; the administration tools don’t. Azure Data Studio retired on 28 Feb 2026 and Microsoft’s own guidance is “keep SSMS for SQL Server Agent” — a Windows-only instruction [9]. Teams is likewise “not supported” with the web client as the sanctioned route [10]. The harder class is shell integration — Fences, DisplayFusion, AutoHotkey, ShareX, Ditto — where Wine offers no hatch at all, because there is no host Windows desktop to hook. Native replacement or drop; there is no third option.
Three items are ordered, not optional, and they happen before the wipe. OneNote extraction requires the OneNote desktop app to be running [11] ⭐ 1.6k (Jul 2026); the WatchGuard .ovpn profile must be exported from Windows; the Dolby DAX3 tuning XML must be dumped if the speaker EQ is to survive. An external clock compounds this: EWS is disabled by default in Exchange Online on 1 Oct 2026, so landing on an EWS-only mail client buys three months [12] — Evolution 3.60’s native Microsoft 365 Graph account type is the destination, not Thunderbird’s EWS support [13].
⚠ One unresolved hardware risk gates everything above. On Legion laptops all external outputs are wired to the dGPU, and hybrid-mode Wayland with a dGPU-attached external display has a long tail of blank-screen reports [14]. Live-boot Plasma 6.7 with the monitor attached and test all three BIOS graphics modes before committing — and note the fallback most people reach for is closed off here, since muxless Optimus passthrough caps a guest at 640×480 and NVIDIA refuses to form Optimus against a virtual iGPU [15].
Which leaves the sharpest open question: if the honest plan keeps a Windows partition for SSMS’s Agent tooling, the WinForms designers and the firmware utilities, is that a migration — or a slow dual-boot that quietly becomes permanent?