Yes non-corporate is pretty important to me as the reason to move away from Windows in the first place! Thanks for the suggestions!

Okay that makes sense. Thanks!

Okay I'll try out a few and keep notes on which ones I prefer until I make that "final" decision.

Yes dual booting seems to be the way to go for a while so I've got my toes in the water but not lost the safety net just yet!

That's true, most of what I do would be in a browser as a casual user. My work laptop would still be running Windows and doing what I "need" (Excel, SolidWorks, etc.) Although I want to keep the ability to torrent and manage my media files nicely, I'm open to using different softwares than I'm used to for those.

Okay great! An interesting tea combination: Mint with Cinnamon :) do most desktop environments work with most distros, or is there a list per each distro?

Thank you for the response! Those you said are getting a lot of mentions so I think Mint will be a good first choice to make the swap.

Lots of suggestions for Mint so it seems that's a good choice for me! Thank you!

That's a great response! Thank you, that helps a lot.

Okay great! I'll give those each a try. Thank you!

Okay thank you! Could you give some examples about tasks that "should be easy" but aren't? I've worked with MacOS casually and I thought it was based on Unix (maybe?), so I was at least aware that the way to maneuver through the desktop/settings/file searches are different from Windows of course. I am certainly not a power user, just getting frustrated with companies overstepping more and more and want to cut myself from their whims, if that makes sense.

Okay that's good to know! Stick with one to get more comfortable until it doesn't do something I need, basically?