Okay…this is going to sound crazy, but my antivirus is - none. Well..I use ClamTK to scan every so often and all it finds are some potentially unwanted programs. But never once in over 10 years has it found a virus. I find it kind of funny when one of these scammer links pops up a “Microsoft has detected a problem” message. I just did a scan - 0 threats found.
I used https://pendrivelinux.com/ to load it on a bootable USB drive. You can play with it there, but it looks and feels a lot like Window’s XP. If you like it - you can install it from there.
I never had much use for a printer, but I my ex gave me a Brother laser printer that was just plug and play - works fine. I remember when I was working and was taking a printer from one office to another, it was an early wireless printer and for fun I tried it at home. Again - it configured easily. I have not tried multifunction devices.
There are tons of programs available in the software manager
I think my newest is an Asus Zenbook, about 6 years old. Somehow it updated itself to W11; pretty sure it came with W10. Don’t use it much because the keyboard is shrunken, and us keyboard people like standard. I’ll take it travelling, and it normally runs Linux Mint Mate version.
Desktop goes back 10 years or more; an AMD FX-6300 6-core processor. Occasionally I will humor the Windoze and let it waste time an unbelievable amount to update, boot, update, boot wash rinse repeat. Micro$oft thinks my 6 core CPU has only 3 cores, and it cannot be “upgraded” to windoze 11. That’s OK it is happily running Linux Mint 22.2
Oh by the way, the Zenbook boots linux in 7 seconds, but takes 30 or more to boot windoze.
Good news Raspy! You can doit! Not only that, but it has been possible for years. Only now we can generally afford the CPU horsepower, the disk space, and the memory space.
The solution to which I refer is called virtualization, and it has more than one implementation. At work we had powerful machines that handled dozens or even hundreds of virtual systems, mostly using the grand daddy of them all, VMware. For a user with more modest resources, Virtualbox will handle the task.
So you could install your virtualbox software and promptly install your favorite version of windoze to run your legacy product. When update comes, it can be there in its own compartment patching and booting while you enjoy computing on Linux. I don’t doit any more; there is nothing I need in windoze.
Something has already taken over my new desktop PC. I’m having to deal with Capcha pick all the bridges to verify who you are crap on every website I visit. I’ve always used windows and now some sites like Utube says google and a username I haven’t used in 10 years. I’m going to try and do the reset function back to windows default and hope I don’t screw something up, but If I disappear you’ll know why.