brave search otoh is pretty gud. I believe they even do their own indexing.

To me it looks you are pretty deep in MS ecosystem. The easiest to switch to Linux are developers because development on Windows sucks and casual users because they depend only on their web browser. Since you are both a gamer and deep in MS office suite it will be very hard because its completley different ecosystem.

My proposal: recreate your environment in VM and switch on linux host with that same setup. And then try get step by step over a year outside of that VM.

I jumped over to runbox with my custom domain. It costs me ~10€ per year and I had no issues thus far. IMAP works great which hasn’t been the case with gmail so I’m very satisfied.