And if I were going to switch to Linux, which is looking pretty likely (thanks, friends!) what distributions and desktops should I consider?
Is GNOME 3 as weird as it sounds?
Twenty-odd years ago I was a debian user, but I got fed up with some font management issues and decamped to the new improved "BSD in a clown suit" MacOS. It's a whole new landscape now.
@cameron I'm an i3 weirdo now, but I used Cinnamon (the default desktop for Linux Mint) for a while and it was pretty fantastic; a very traditional desktop that just worked well. (Mint is another Debian-derived distro, but you can run Cinnamon on Ubuntu if you want. Switching between desktops is pretty easy if you want to compare and contrast; you just select which environment you want when you log in.)
@federicomena Thank you!
@cameron I'm mostly joking. I ran Arch the last time I had a dedicated linux machine, maybe 15 years ago, because I wanted an OS with everything I wanted and nothing I didn't, but it's probably true that if you run Arch, your hobby is running linux. You'll learn a lot, but you'll have to learn a lot.
I lean toward Ubuntu as a pretty user friendly distro.
I personally find Gnome3 to be annoying, but that may just be because I am used to gnome2. The gnome2 branch has split off as mate, which does the trick for me if I need a graphical interface.
Oh, and the Ubuntu LTS releases, with five year support are a big plus for me. The idea that you should have to update your OS once or twice each year drives me a little crazy.
Paging @federicomena and @alikins for their opinions as well