I think there might also be a subcultural difference, too, because there are different types of “tryna” that are used by different groups of people, and maybe being used to a more versatile “tryna” would make “tryna not x” more natural to speak.

Tryna A: “I’m just tryna screw in this lightbulb,” “I’m not tryna hurt you”

Tryna B (expanded tryna, not spoken by everyone, mostly skews younger and bro-ier I think): “You tryna go to Taco Bell right now?” “You tryna chill tomorrow?”

That’s interesting. I feel differently. “Trying not to kill myself” sounds a lot more natural than the split “trying to not kill myself.” “Trying to not kill myself” sounds like internet slang that makes the statement sound awkward on purpose so it’s taken less seriously. But the former format is way more natural to speak.

4K HDR

Normally I use kdenlive to edit video, which supports 4K AFAIK, but although that doesn’t support HDR it looks like DaVinci Resolve supports both.

Taxes

That’s surprising. Turbotax and Quickbooks have online options, and there are a few native apps like GnuCash, but I haven’t used them—TurboTax works for me.

GarageBand

Yeah that’s too bad. I hear good things about Ardour, though. Also, bandlab if you’re okay with a webapp.

Netflix

I only stream on an actual TV, not my computer, so I haven’t done this in a while, but I thought you could do this in Firefox with DRM enabled? If not, seems like there are addons which enable it. Might be outdated knowledge.

vector illustration

Fun is hard to come by

git client

Git clients all suck for me, CLI is the way to go. However, my co-workers that use git clients all use GitKraken (on macOS) and that is available on Linux, too.

screen recording was also painful

Won’t argue with you there. Don’t know why it doesn’t have first-class support in many distros. I hear OBS Studio works well for this if you want to do anything fancy with the recording, otherwise there are plenty of apps for this (Kazam might be a simpler choice).

barely meets my use cases

I think really (considering the above) your main issue is that you just have some strong software preferences. There are certainly ways to meet most if not all of the use cases you listed. It requires a big change in workflow, though.

For what it’s worth, I find that most of the issues with software alternatives in Linux is that everyone often recommends free/GPL replacements, which are invariably worse than the commercial/non-free software the user is used to. But there is paid software in Linux land, too, remember. In my case, I have often found that if I can pay for the software it will be better, and if there’s a webapp version of something non-free it will often be better than the native FOSS alternative. There are many notable exceptions to that rule, but money does solve the occasional headache.