I’m not the person you posed this question to, but I’d recommend the general strategy of making a list of features and functionalities that you personally need and want. By making your decisions against such a list, you are less at the whims of trends because unless your needs change, your tool doesn’t need to. The key is to be honest about what you really need. Applies to all of life, really.

Notepad++ ...There are alternatives, but none that save the current session (including unsaved files). The best option was to run it through Wine, but that seems overkill for a notepad style app.

And thats my beef every time I switch to Linux, I come back to Windows because the apps in Windows are there and it just works. I used Linux Mint for a year, but it was a lot of finding similar but not quite as good apps as what I would use on Windows.

Plug for FreeOffice, a file-compatible MS Office clone for Mac and Linux! (That said, MS Office is cloudified now, afaik, so you might be able to continue using it on the web.)

No. I run those under Wine or VirtualBox.