These are usenet data sales. Usenet is an old network of distributed discussion groups that predates the web by about a decade. It contains a large trove of media and software - particularly older media and software - that is easy to acccess because it’s not a P2P network that is reliant others keeping their shares alive.
Many usenet providers offer bulk data plans, rather than continual subscriptions. This means you buy x GB of bandwidth, and you use it on whatever time table you like.These are great if you don’t do a lot of downloading, or if you’re just trying it out, or if you’re using usenet as a secondary or tertiary source for things.
Like the fesiverse, most usenet providers do not provide a full view of the whole network, so it can also be good to have a secondary provider that has different retention policies, so a lot of usenet users will buy these data blocks for that purpose, as well.
I did this a few months ago. I haven’t found replacements for everything, but I’ve found that it’s really come down to my not actually using those things very much in the first place, so I haven’t had to do the work.
When I look, I find something that works. What are you still looking for?
I find the array of installation options a little overwhelming or intimidating sometimes. If I can just do the equivalent of apt-get, that’s, of course, easy enough. But sometimes things are just realeased as tar balls, and I have to go and look up WTF I’m supposed to do each time. Nothing comes up often enough for me to internalize it.
I do find myself chafing against just the fundamental differences of the *nix environment from the DOS-based heritage of Windows. And I find it difficult to get help with certain things sometimes because the installed user/developer base isn’t super interested in supporting different modes of interaction (“just use the terminal, it’s so much faster [for me]” is a common refrain that makes me want to get stabby). But 99% of the time, it’s been smooth sailing.
At this stage, if you have drivers for everything, and there’s nothing mission critical that’s still tied to Windows, the best advice I can give you is to copy your important files over from your Windows partition, and then dump it. If you have a 2nd computer, leave that one running Windows for now. The duel booting can make it tempting to just reboot into Windows “just for this one thing”, and stay there until you next have to restart.