Wine and crossover can probably meet the needs of most of your windows app needs at this point, which realistically aren’t a lot if you look into it, and keep a windows vm / cloud instance handy. Why not try a vm of Linux on your windows machine (or use WSL) to get your toes in the water to see if your assumptions are still correct today?
There is a lemmy seed script you can use as an admin that gets you a “default sub” experience https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
You can’t turn pictrs off as a configuration setting?