Pop os. Need to make the time for the transition and do a little testing with the bootdisk to make sure drivers will work out okay.

I've been using Lubuntu on my potato laptops for years and tried mint on a win89 machine, so I figure this couldn't possibly be as hard.

What in God's Green Earth are you talking about, "windows-or-nothing people"? Employers? Schools? Told a lot of them to kick dirt, but with them owning the buildings, that basically amounted to me walking away.

One of my favorite things about my current employer is that the "Windows" part doesn't matter -it just happens to be the only thing the bespoke software suites we use will run-on, and the entire shift is spent in those applications anyways. I've almost got my boss convinced to ditch Acrobat Reader though, or rather, its constant demands to be allowed to present AI Summaries of confidential documents is doing the convincing for me.

The simple fact is, all four of my children can generally get done what they want/need to in Windows, Mac, Chrome, Android or IOS, including customization or "esoteric" stuff, and get on with their lives, without coming to me pretending there aren't a million tutorials on Youtube for whatever and that they shouldn't even have to check there first. Only one of them has shown the same aptitude, willingness, patience, what-have-you, for Linux. Another is just too young to tell where she'll go with all that.

I meet my users and use-cases where they are and presume a heterogenous network/device environment. That becomes and stays true the moment you introduce a game console, a printer, a tablet, phone and/or a router of all things.

I like Linux, love it and can't wait to get back to using it more in fact, but using only Linux isn't going to leave me with any way to relate to or convince people who are sceptical and comfortable with another OS they are already experienced with, and forcing it into the present state of my life is going to demand time I don't have available for the next year or so, but it was my daily driver for years and will be again.

Meanwhile, I'm counting down a shorter-every-day fuse for when the one boy wants an Amiga or roll-your-own-"retro" device of some sort to go with his RaspberryPi, OrangePi, plus various consoles and old phones he's torn-down to the compotenent leven and built back up(successfully ... err ... to a surprising degree anyways), and his brother just laid claim to my (kickstarter-era)Snapmaker A350 CNC/Laser/3D Printer.