Wine is the only way I know of to run Windows stuff on Linux, other things build on top of Wine (Proton is based on Wine and is oriented for game support, Lutris is a game-oriented launcher that helps with using Wine, etc).

A bit of pedantry: Wine is a compatibility layer, it captures Windows calls and makes them happen using its own libraries and capabilities of the operating system.

Documentation: I recommend Arch wiki - it is one of the best wikis and (mostly) works for non-Arch distros, too

I recommend getting comfortable with the terminal, and after that - understanding how to troubleshoot an unbootable system (for example if GRUB goes ) using livecd environment. And also try to learn Vim on comfortable pace, if you happen to like it, it'll be great. Also make sure you have regular backups of important data.

Wine is still the emulation software of choice

Yes. (Or well, no, since Wine Is Not an Emulator)

get some windows based software running that I need

What is that software?

Have you turned off secure boot?

Idk if it's fixed yet but it probably isn't. Best to play it safe.

You might find Bottles to be a lot easier to use for getting windows apps up and running than messing around with straight WINE. It has a nice GUI and handles a lot of stuff more automatically. I've only used it for a couple small things, but it is neat. The thing I've had most trouble with in WINE/Bottles is things that need to interact with external hardware over USB. It can be done in some cases but its thorny

For software development there's kind of infinite options. it depends what kind of software you're developing I guess.

In terms of "what it's doing", it should be fairly little. Been a while since I used mint but other apt based distros generally have automatic security updates on by default, so I'm 90% sure mint will too (no restart required or anything, they've never caused me a single issue, but you can disable them if you want)

If you want to see like, every service running on the machine you can run sudo systemctl status in a terminal and look through like everything (or go even deeper and look at every running process, but systemctl will actually get you pretty close. If you just want to see system level background daemons try sudo systemctl | grep running). On a default install without a bunch of programs installed and started there shouldn't be much besides OS internals

OS internals can look like a lot though... things like (looking at my own system for reference here)

• the display server,
• display/login manager,
• sound server,
• print server,
• desktop environment (this may have a lot of different subcomponents),
• system buses for communication,
• time sync daemon,
• maybe some hardware related stuff, like for reading sensors or using poorly supported peripherals, or communicating with your motherboard/chipset
• network manager and related bits for wifi, bluetooth, potentially cellular modems, etc
• logging daemon
• etc

use vimtutor to learn vi/vim navigation so you'll always be able to work with files in the terminal.

Since you say you want to go over the different components: You can get a list of installed packages with dpkg -l, which includes a short description.

If you want a long description, use apt show $package. If you want to see a list files included with it, use dpkg -L $package. That's only system files obviously, any program that runs as your login user will have its configuration files and stuff somewhere in ~ and that will not be listed by dpkg.

Also protip: if you want to see only, say, binaries included with a package, do dpkg -l foo | grep bin.

One thing I'd really like to do is learn what the default install of Mint+Cinnamon is doing, how to go over the different components, how to pick and choose what i want this thing doing. I didn't find the official documentation overly helpful, troubleshooting the install aside, so i wanted to ask here

It sounds like, as soon as you get half-comfortable, you should install Arch.

This is not a meme, your question is exactly what archlinux exists for.

Don't use the installer, follow the good old https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

Good luck, don't take Arch too seriously.

All of you have been immensely helpful. I've saved or acted on a good chunk of the advice here, so thank you all!!!