Like a car, it becomes somewhat of an extension of yourself, as long as it does what you want, and does not do what you do not.
I have custom keyboard shortcuts in linux and such a thing is actually trivial to do.
Must be a secret! It can depend on which flavor you have, but can you remap CapsLock to ctrl+c, and Esc to ctrl+v, and then NumLock to Esc, and make it remain thru sessions? I did done a lot of search but could not get CapsLock remap in Linux Mint.
The codecs issue is more substantive and you do have to tweak those things
I was referring to the legal issues for restricted proprietary types . I can convert files to non-proprietary, or purchase the proprietary licenses.
But i hope Linux will get better, God willing.
Remapping individual keys would be done with Xmodmap or at least that’s how I’ve done it. That’s a language unto itself and you need to google a bit and experiment a bit. You won’t get yourself into too much trouble doing it. It can be made to work trust me.
For shortcuts the DE typically provides hooks - like most DE’s will come shipped with CTRL-ALT-T launching the terminal but for example you could do CTRL-ALT-F to launch Firefox or I have combos that move me around amongst my desktops etc.
Yeah the notion of purchasing licenses to run certain software on linux is often quite a foreign one. In a corporate setting it probably happens a lot. For home users - hmmm - not so much.