As I don't know the exact error messages you're getting I'll try and give you a general pointers.

If it complains a package is missing, install it from the repo, along with its x86 version by appending :i386 to package name (eg. totem:i386).

If on the other hand it says some files, usually with .so extension, couldn't be located, fire up the terminal: Naturally, previous command you will only execute once. This program lets you search all the packages in your repositories by contents, regardless of whether you have them installed or not. It is good to update apt-file database before the search, something you will need to do anyway before first use: where you substitute <filename> with the missing one (and without <>).

After you have located the containing package, install it as well as its i386 version.


Once everything is done you will notice something different about yourself, where the irresistible persona oozing with confidence boosted by your nocturnal command-line excursions becomes a chick magnet like never before, which is the main reason OP would want to switch. And my apologies to your wife for disclosing this, but she has become married to an insatiable player, who can choose to dual boot whenever and wherever he wants to!

It depends on which version of X you run. AMD frequently run into problems with too new X servers they haven't accounted for, which matters to us that run rolling distributions (like Arch) that are continuously kept up-to-date but not so much for those that run a plain Ubuntu and don't add on PPA's for newer versions than Ubuntu ships.

The open MESA Radeon drivers - of course - don't have this problem, but they on the other hand don't offer all the features of AMD's official drivers.

Or they don't work in resource heavy games like Train Fever and make them unplayable (aka crash to desktop).

Don't forget to follow up with
sudo apt-get upgrade

Edit: You usually don't need dist-upgrade for stable releases

If you are re-installing window 7, you may want to check the newly introduce Microsoft spyware and uninstall these updates.

https://www.hackread.com/microsoft-updates-spy-on-windows7-8-users/

Tip for if re-installing win7.
Just disconnect internot whilst doing it all & turn off updates, then stick internot back on.
That`s what I did & worked fine for me.

Back when I was shortly using Windows 10, it also rebooted the PC unexpectedly while I was doing something. Nothing major, I think I was just browsing the web when it happened. Still quite irritating.

I thought it was not supposed to do that, ie. it will wait until the PC really is idle? Maybe that algorithm is broken then, and it reboots the PC for updates whenever it feels like it.

Yeah, I like the Linux way better. It just informs me when there are updates available, and then I tell it to download and install them when I'm ready. Linux doesn't treat me as an idiot, which is what Windows is increasingly doing.

But can you really blame Microsoft for treating people like idiots? They've proven time and again that they can get away with anything, and that most people don't really care, they will keep installing Windows anyway.

Ashes of the Singularity, probably the first game developed for direct X 12 is developing for Vulkan too.

In fact the development studio is part of Khronos group and heavily involved in the new OpenGL (Vulkan) development.

Direct X 12 may not be a monopoly of window 10 yet.

It's free and It will run acceptably on a wide range of hardware new & old so you can try it right away on the computer you have now. It a lot easier now than when I started to use it back in 2006. You can try it without having to directly install it on the hardware; install VirtualBox in Windows, download an install ISO of Linux Mint or Ubuntu, setup VirtualBox to boot from the downloaded install ISO and you'll be on you to test drive to your heart's content. Once you're comfortable running it VirtualBox you can either use LinuxLive USB to create a bootable flash drive from the ISO or burn a boot DVD.

It's not as difficult to use as some nay-sayers may make it sound. 4 years ago my then 11 & 9 year old nephews were able to figure out how to start MAME in Ubuntu on my old Atom-based EEE PC netbook so they could play Metal Slug without me telling them how to do it. The only comment they had was, "How come your Windows looks funny?"
Claiming using Windows is easier than using Linux is not unlike claiming it's easier to defecate in a diaper than using a toilet.
I can watch DVD & Blu-Ray movies fine in Ubuntu Mate with the restricted-addons & restricted-extras installed or libdvdcss, libbluray & MakeMKV. I can play a great amount of games from GOG & Humble Bundle naively in Linux and a large amount of Windows games via WINE. No exaggeration, I find it on the whole much easier to encode, transcode, convert, et cetera multimedia files in Linux compared to Windows. I agree that if one is lazy & accustomed to limited or no customization it will probably seem as not as user-friendly. For many routine tasks, once you become familiar with them, it's much quicker to use the command-line terminal than to navigate through the menus. Claiming using Windows is easier than using Linux is not unlike claiming it's easier to defecate in a diaper than using a toilet.

It's also nice in that you can have more control when you want/need it. You can, for example, put some of the commands in a cron job if the desktop environment doesn't do it already. Even better, you can schedule the cron job to happen whenever you want it to (like, say, 3 in the morning, for example). (I am pretty sure there is also a program out there that schedules jobs like this when the load average is low, if you would prefer that instead (or in addition!).)

On Debian systems, for example (don't type the quotes, of course):
"apt-get update" will cause the computer to check to see if there are any updates, but won't actually download them. (Some desktop environments will tell you if there are updates ready after this command.)
"apt-get -d upgrade" will download the updates, but not install them. This could be useful in a cron job, for example, if your Internet is metered, but the limit only applies some of the time. Or it could just be used as a way of downloading updates at times there's likely to be less network traffic, like the middle of the night.
"apt-get -y upgrade" will download and automatically install the updates. I would only advise doing this on the stable branch, if you do it at all. Doing this on testing or unstable is just asking for trouble. (Note that I believe it will not reboot the system, even if a reboot is necessary for a kernel update to take effect.)

As you can see, there is a lot of flexibility here, ranging from "don't even check except when I say so", to "apply updates automatically unless something really wrong happens" or even "apply updates automatically even if something bad is definitely going to happen" (which I didn't list here; if you *really* want to do that, look it up yourself).

To me personally

Linux has good balance of performance vs used resource.
Basically, for basic functionality such as desktop and file manager, it uses resource (cpu/memory/gpu) very lightly, leaving a lot to spare for doing anything I need (file managing, browsing, downloading, watching videos, occasionally video/audio/graphic editing and gaming). For all of this functionality I need, even my i3 3.6ghz 4gb ram Nvidia 240 is already more than capable.

WinXP also has this good balance, but it's left to dust by MS. Win7 takes a little more resource than I like. 8 and 10 is basically heavier than 7. Don't mention Vista. That's one OS I need to thank for my migration to Linux :)

This could be useful in a cron job, for example, if your Internet is metered, but the limit only applies some of the time. Or it could just be used as a way of downloading updates at times there's likely to be less network traffic, like the middle of the night.
This would apply very much to my case.
I am allowed 10 gigs during the daytime hours and 10 between 12 AM and 7 AM.
Would this allow me to schedule downloads from GOG in the wee hours?
Thanks

That's what i was saying. You got it right, you are easy to use that OS.

And no, that won't download anything from GOG. It would update your installed packages or download the upgrade for those packages. And no, your FedEx order won't come faster either.

Try this for your thing:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/download-scheduler/?src=search