Sophienomenal

Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut has worked well for me. A quick Google search shows a standard AMD AM5 CPU IHS is 32×32mm, and the normal recommendation for that is a pea sized dot in the center. Given that you’re talking about a laptop CPU, the exposed die will be significantly smaller. A delidded i7-8700k, for instance, is 9.2x16.7mm, which is only 15% of the area, so you would use roughly 15% of a pea of thermal paste for that die size. Granted, I don’t know the actual die size of an i7-7500U, so take that with a grain of salt.

Here is an iFixIt guide on how to repaste a laptop. Do not forget to remove the old thermal paste (and do so with a lint free cloth)! They recommend using an amount of thermal paste the size of a grain of rice. That seems a little small to me, but then again, I only paste desktop processors. I expect someone else here may have more experience with laptops.

I second disabling Nouveau via blacklist, and I’m unsure if there is similar software for Lenovo, but I use asusctl to force the use of the Nvidia card over the integrated Vega graphics. This could very well be an issue with graphics card switching, so it’s worth looking into.

As for distro recs, while most would probably recommended Linux Mint for beginners, I prefer to recommend Bazzite. It’s Fedora-based, but comes with Nvidia drivers and lots of gaming optimization baked-in.

It’s worth looking into Lutris for non-Steam games as well. Comes preinstalled with Bazzite (heavily gaming-optimized Linux distro), though I don’t have any non-Steam games to try it on since Steam works fine for all the games I play.

Well, the hardening, just as with Tor Browser, does break some sites. It comes preinstalled with NoScript and uBlock Origin, the former of which you will either have to learn how to use or disable, depending on your wants for privacy. While it doesn’t include some of the anti-features of base Firefox, it is still based on Firefox so it will have similar performance for similar tasks.

Personally, I use Mullvad for most of my browsing, and Firefox for a few specific things (like staying logged into site long-term and such).

It’s available as a flatpak via Flathub for an easy installation, otherwise you can check https://mullvad.net/en/browser/linux for distro-specific installation instructions.

I use Mullvad Browser. It’s maintained in coordination with the Tor Project, and is essentially the Tor Browser with Tor itself stripped out. Same browser fingerprinting protections, however, among other things.

EDIT: I’d like to clarify that this has nothing to do with my trust in Mozilla or Firefox itself, especially not concerning recent panics about benign changes. I still use Firefox on the side, it just does not have fingerprinting protections by default, and hardening it manually leads to minor differences between user configurations (even with Arkenfox if that’s still around) that is solved by Mullvad Browser for me. I use Mullvad Browser for my main browsing, and Firefox for specific exceptions. Firefox itself is fine, and no, Mozilla is not burning it to the ground.

Correct, but I believe the user is looking for a cracked version, as they don’t have a license. The likelihood of that existing is significantly lower on Linux than it is for Windows given the much smaller userbase, the fragmentation into multiple package formats, and the overall distaste of proprietary software in the Linux community.

I can’t help with pirating software, your options are going to be heavily limited because most people running Linux would just prefer open source alternatives (like Blender), so it’s far less likely you will find cracked software specifically made for Linux (plus, there is a far smaller userbase). On some quick searching, I did find someone who had issues running Houdini in a VM (for multiple distros), but it worked fine when it was installed natively. I’m not seeing an entry in the WINE database for Houdini, so while you could always try running a Windows version through WINE, given the type of program it is, I highly doubt it would run without issue. I have no recommendations on how to get ahold of a Linux compatible version without a license.

Because it’s had stellar Wayland streaming support (with audio) for somewhere around 2 years at this point, is still way better in that regard than native Discord, and has a thriving plugin suite that lets you enjoy features the native app will never allow.

virt-manager is my go-to. There’s also Gnome Boxes, but I’ve never used it myself. virt-manager is the best I’ve tried, personally. Both use KVM, so they should be much more resource efficient