BladeFederation

When ECC no longer costs a mortgage, I will look into upgrading.

Admitting their mistakes makes me want to read their articles more. If only Microsoft could bring themselves to do the same.

Technically correct...

Threat modeling is simply knowing where potential threats to yourself comes from, and planning accordingly. Most of us have some sort of risk of surveillance capitalism. Companies tracking you across sites, Ai scanning your email and photos, that sort of thing. As creepy as that is, if someone is targeting you specifically as a stalker or trying to break into your accounts, or physically into your home, that will be more important to model for. The things you to to. mitigate one thing may not be the same as something else. Sometimes they can be almost opposite actions, though there are certainly best practices to have in general.

If you know your threat model, you can find guides online of how to plan for it, and you can ask communities online more specific questions if you know what you are asking FOR.

Your technical knowledge as described is unironically far beyond the average user so I'd say you're probably good. Depends on what you want to do though. You can occasionally have problems if you need to do something specific or are married to software that doesn't exist on Linux. Word processing is down pat. You won't have the app version of Microsoft Office, but there are open source alternatives like LibreOffice that are compatible with Office file types. For formatting, you may have to download some Microsoft owned fonts since they're technically proprietary and not bundled with Linux/your office suite. In browser, Microsoft 365 and Google Docs works no differently than normal.

As someone else mentioned, you can test almost any distro on a live USB. There is also this site where you can remote in and test the general look and feel for free. You won't have an internet connection though:

https://distrosea.com/

Which is why you buy a Windows machine, then put Linux on it. You said there's no reason to buy a Windows machine. Even if you abandon Windows forever, there's still a reason to buy it. There are use cases that Apple silicon is not good for, like gaming. And having competition is good.

Kind of a weird example to say that people won't online shop too. That's far more common for all types of people than walking into a store is these days.

They block VPN connections, that's why it appears down. Ironic for a privacy site.

Average people still game. And Linux is improving rapidly. Apple isn't.

This would take dozens of hours though. If there were absolutely no option I would consider it but it is also absolutely useless for discovery: I have to already know it's there and add it myself. Every time someone sends me their address, I have to add it to OSM before I can navigate to it. That is a non-starter for regular, reliable use. If I just had to add something every once in a while that would be one thing, but it's entirely unusable.

Someday... someday.

Nothing other than "they're working on it" and rumors that it'll be done by the end of the year. That's always been their approach. They never make significant changes unlessnit will have next to no hiccups.

You known what, good job Apple. You've been winning me over lately. I'm not sure I'd exactly recommend this route to people, the 8 GB RAM is rough even with macOS being more efficient with it. But in the RAM-pocalypse we'll take what we can get, and the rest is fire for budget range.