While I have mostly used Arch in the past, Mint has always been my second favorite distro. Now that my computer usage is becoming less technical as I turn away from my career in IT, I thought it would be wise to migrate to a "just works" or "beginner friendly" linux distro. This strikes a middle ground between the polish of mac os that comes at the price of terrible gaming and scripting, and the very hands on nature of my custom arch setup. I make minimal adjustments to Linux Mint, only installing a small handful of packages that are documented in the readme of my dotfiles repo.
I'm currently using brave as my primary web browser. I like it due to it's builtin adblock and speed. I've also extensively used both Librewolf and Qutebrowser in the past and can recommend them for enhanced privacy protection and keyboard driven operation respectively.
My media player of choice is mpv, it's great for both audio and video and the dominant choice among linux users. To mac users I can recommend IINA.
I use ffmpeg to record audio and video, to do basic audio post-processing and to convert between the various encoders and container formats. If you're on linux it's likely already installed as a dependency to something else.
I use imagemagick to do all my basic image conversion and editing.
This includes cropping, scaling, captions, appending, rotation.
For anything more advanced, which I only need to do every few months, I use gimp.
Poppler is a great little library for basic pdf editing, like splitting and concatenation.
With yt-dlp I download youtube videos, music, or full channels even.
Enough said.
I've written at length about all the various components that go into this website.
Check out my blog post on it here.
I wrote all my academic papers in emacs org-mode using the latex export.
This is a pretty common setup among emacs users.
I also did my college presentations in emacs org-mode, leveraging latex beamer.
One nice feature of latex beamer I've seen nowhere else is the progress indicator at the top.
I format job applications via LaTeX ModernCV and can highly recommend it to stand out amongst the mountain of poorly typeset CVs made in Microsoft word.
I use the banking style and prefer a red accent color.
My spell checker of choice is aspell, which I frequently invoke through ispell in emacs.
It has it's flaws, if you know of something better on linux please let me know.