Linux

First time Linux user you mean?

I wouldn't recommend it, unless you can navigate the terminal well. When you install arch, it installs no desktop environment, only the ability to talk to a terminal.

It's technically possible and very doable with some googling, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Depends what your goals are. With Arch, you will need to closely follow a guide to get it installed, if anything goes wrong you will need to search through the Arch Wiki for answers. Arch has an insane amount of customisation options, you will spend a lot of time in the Arch Wiki learning about them. By installing Arch you will learn a lot about Linux. Is that your goal?

You will spend more time reading and learning, but come out further ahead than someone who first installs Ubuntu or Mint.

However if your goal is to simply install Linux on your PC to try it out, (if you don't even know if you will like it, and don't know if you want to learn it's mechanics) then Arch wouldn't be my first choice.

The language you want is “nonfree” in Debian derivatives.

This would depend on the distro you use. Most distros will require you to enable a non-free repository before you can install anything that isn't Foss or open source from the official repos. You could also use an FSF approved distro. Keep in mind, the FSF will only approve distros that don't include any non-free anything in the official repos. Besides that, you just have to know the licensing before you install it.

Depends on the distro. Some have a configuration setting to allow unfree software or not, others have separate repos.

Depends on the distribution, many package managers can filter by license. So you can find anything that doesn't have an open source license.

Install the package kdegraphics-thumbnailers, and then depending on the file manager you may have to enable previews, e.g. in Dolphin > Configure Dolphin > Interface > Previews.

The first thing I'll say is the reason you're more comfortable with Windows is because you've been using it for however long and learning to deal with the issues it has. The same needs to be done on Linux. You'll have to learn how it works just like you forgot you did for Windows.

Second, along with logs like other users said, you have to know how to use a search engine well. Most issues will be easy to solve, but some may take some searching. The Arch wiki is a good resource even if you aren't using Arch.

Just come ask here when you have trouble, and we'll try to help.

When troubleshooting, the biggest thing is searching the web honestly. But some more things to help you out: look for logs. Linux has loads of logs and sometimes can tell you how to fix the problem.

Logs may not be immediately apparent. Some programs have their own log files that you can look into. Sometimes, if you run the program from the terminal, it'll print out logs there. Otherwise, you read look through journalctl, although this has logs for everything so might be harder to search.

Another useful tip, particularly for system tools and terminal tools, is manual pages. Just run man ls and replace ls with any command, you'll get the documentation on how to use that tool.

First suggestion: commit to using Ubuntu for a set period of time. Could be a week, could be 2 hours. When you encounter issues, force yourself to stay on Ubuntu.

What you'll find is that at first, errors will seem like gibberish, then you'll do some snooping online, and find out how to access some log files or poke around your loaded modules. You'll slowly learn commands and what they do.

Eventually, something will click, ie; "wait a minute, I just checked to see which kernel modules are loaded, and I'm missing one that was mentioned in my error, that must mean I need to load that module at boot." You load that module, reboot, try your command again, and bam, everything works. You've learned how to troubleshoot an issue.

The best way to learn Linux is to immerse yourself in it. You can't efficiently learn German if, every time you hear a phrase you don't understand, you switch back to English, right?

Using a different version of WINE/Proton could work. It may also depend on some extra utilities you need to install on your WINE prefix (Wine tricks is the tool to use for this). If that doesn't work, the almost guaranteed to work option is a virtual machine running Windows. This comes with a small performance hit, but that may not be a concern.

How are you launching the exe with WINE? Try doing it via the command line if you aren't already. That way you may get some more information about why it isn't working. Its as simple as wine path/to/your/exe

You could also try something like Bottles, which will let you use possibly newer versions of WINE without modifying your system's WINE.

It could be that only the installer has issues. If you're dual booting have you tried launching the already installed program from your windows partition?

Otherwise I would try launching the installer from the wine command line to see if it gives you a specific error there.

you can use grub-mkconfig to verify the grub config and rebuild it if necessary. i dont recall the exact syntax for your distro so I would look it up first.

If you can boot back into windows, turn off quick startup/shutdown, run chkdsk or whatever on the drives, reboot back into windows then boot back into Linux and you’ll be okay.

Quick startup is a kind of weird sleep/hibernate mutant that leaves drives in an unclean state when it turns off, so the Linux drivers for ntfs say “I’m not gonna touch that possibly damaged drive”.

I think the disks could be Dynamic Disks on which it would not be a good idea to install a linux distro.

Unfortunately Microsoft's own advice to change it to a basic disk (since it considers dynamic deprecated) WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS.

Since you only want to access them it seem to be possible with ldmtool. While it is a cli tool there is a corresponding service that at least according to some askubuntu posts and arcwiki should make them behave like normal filesystems.