If you’re developing specifically for Windows, you’re going to need Windows somewhere in the process be it bare metal or vm. You will also have problems with Excel on Linux although you could try the online one.

If you want to test windows programs on linux, you’re probably going to want to do that in a virtual machine, or even a spare computer just for testing on windows. Depending on how much you need to use excel, a virtual machine could be a good option for that as well, but if using Microsoft Excel™ is a big part of your job, maybe it makes more sense to just stay on Windows for work at least

Take the following with a grain of salt, it depends on your specific setup, environment and preference, but might help you:

Regarding system backups, and depending whether you need to run fedora, check out nixos, which takes a declarative file and builds your system based on that. Declarative immutable system, no moving parts, no breakage. If your system breaks, revert to a prior version and keep using what you’ve had before before retrying. Your backup is a git repo or whatever is keeping your handful of config files. Has been an absolute game changer for me, and the community and ecosystem around it is far beyond the point of quirky esoteric immutable distro.

VSCode has a powerful feature that I’ve yet to see in another editor/IDE - remote development, and it works really, really well. Spin up a VM however you like (I’d recommend checking out Vagrant), and depending on how much you need to do in windows either use the windows box as a remote run target (just running your built artifact in windows), or as a remote development box (running everything in windows and using your Linux VSCode as a “Frontend” for everything else happening in windows). Both methods can be made to work seamlessly in vsc.

Excel - again depending on your usage, you can try wine, you can use a VM, dual boot, M365 in browser, or a remote VM.

The best Linux is WSL.

For Excel, you can use OnlyOffice.

Sounds like you’ve got a good handle on most of it. FWIW, here’s how I deal with the same issues:

For Windows apps I’ve found a virtual machine is the easiest solution. It’s set it up to share folders between Linux and the Windows VM so moving things between OS’s is easy. I’ve tried other methods like Wine, and for the Windows apps I need the VM works best by far.

Did you mean Timeshift? (Time Machine is Apple software.) Timeshift works great for incremental backups so you should get it working, but in my case I also do full system backups every few weeks because setting up my systems from scratch is a PITA and really time consuming, especially for my server.

For those full backups I’ve set up a bootable persistent live USB SSD with Ubuntu. The persistent SSD is fully configured with all software, including VNC, SSH and Clonezilla. Creating a backup requires plugging in the SSD, rebooting and running Clonezilla either locally or remotely. Clonezilla is also also preconfigured so it requires only a few steps to start the backup. Full system backups take about 20-30 minutes to complete but my SSDs aren’t that big.

Enjoy your move to Linux. It’s well worth the effort.

Do the programs you develop run on wine? It could be an option while developing, but either way you’ll have to QA it on windows at some point.

For backups I don’t think full disk backups are ever needed or useful. Because if the system is running there’s always a chance of corruption. Besides 90% of what’s on your system is recoverable, so you should automate that part and backup what is not recoverable, i.e. personal documents. I use Borg, check out Pika or Vorta for some GUIs for it, and I use Borgbase for my remote, but you can also backup to some folder.

For the other two you need windows. Even if you managed to get vscode to compile and tested with wine, that’s not a guarantee that it will work on Windows. Same thing for excel, even if libre office had those features it’s not guaranteed that stuff that works there would work on excel.

If you need windows for work you need to find a way to have windows available, trying to circumvent this would be a source of pain.

Timeshift is great for getting your system back after a major fuckup. But i dont think it works as a backup solution that can be transplanted to other systems, but i never tried.

I use Kup to backup my important stuff. It comes with a kcm that integrates into KDEs settings menu and can do automated timed backups. Its a wrapper for bup. It also does Incremental backups.

RE: backups, I’d recommend altering your workflow. Instead of taking an image of a box, automate the creation of that box. Create a bash script that takes a base OS, and installs everything you use fresh. Then have it apply configuration files where appropriate, and lastly figure out which applications really need backup blobs to work properly (thunderbird, for example). Once you have that, your backups become just the data itself. Photos, documents, etc. Everything else is effectively ephemeral because it can be reproduced through automation.

Takes a lot less space, is a lot more portable. And much better in scenarios where something in your OS is broken or you get a new computer and want to replicate your setup.

For image backups I use Clonezilla.

It works well but I don’t know how easily you could take an image from one computer to a different one. I tried once and it didn’t work because of Legacy Bios issues…still I guess it works between two modern computers.

I’d love if something like this was implemented directly in a distribution for ease of use.

I use btrfs-assistant to schedule my btrfs snapshots. It’s maybe not quite as simple to set up as Timeshift, but it works on arbitrary subvolume layouts.

I do use rsync when backing up remote computers, locally I use dump/restore. I prefer it because of the ability to get a directory listing from the backup, pick and choose files or restore the entire file system as necessary.

Comparing switching from windows to another piece of software to being a refugee is truly the most privileged techbro thing I’ve seen in a long time. Well, since mid January at least.

Pika Backup does backups. For testing Windows, you’ll want to run a VM, QEMU is best for that (There’s a KDE wrapper I forget the name of for it with a better GUI) but you can probably do some level of testing running your app with Wine. You can run Excel with Wine (also the Office365 web Excel runs in browser)