> I'd very much like to switch to Linux to lose some of the Windows awfulness, but (as you say) the reality of getting a particular computer working sufficiently well is somewhere between non-trivial and ulcer-inducingly complicated, and anyway the absence of native Microsoft Office makes it a non-starter.
Switch to Mac. Honestly. Office is decent enough for creatives to use (otherwise you'd get half the ad industry to close). Add Hyperswitch to get a decent alt-tab, Karabiner so you can remap ctrl+c/v to avoid twisting your hands, and a Windows keyboard layout to not lose your muscle memory for braces and other special characters (that Apple doesn't print on the keyboard FFS), SizeUp for having Windows shortcuts to move your windows around without a mouse - and that's it. A Mac that gets enough of the Windows muscle memory to make the transition pretty painlss.
Thanks :) I'm actually a long-time Mac user, but switched to a Windows laptop a year ago due to availability of certain apps. My Windows installations are usually pain free, with all of the recent crap disabled or removed. The growing hatred comes from everything else: Office, and the poor UX of the online variants, and the awful usability of the modern iteration of Sharepoint (or whatever it's called now), and crappy unreliable authentication flows, and Teams repeatedly changing its UI, and Teams and Outlook pushing new variants on you, and Teams causing problems for someone on a call most of the time.
Sadly, as this article discussed, Mac OS is not going in a direction that's strongly encouraging. Plus, RE: Microsoft Office, I always believed that it was handicapped on Mac versus Windows. Excel seemed to bog down more quickly when faced with large spreadsheets, and the whole suite seemed sluggish, as if it was running through a not very efficient compatibility layer.
Switch to Mac. Honestly. Office is decent enough for creatives to use (otherwise you'd get half the ad industry to close). Add Hyperswitch to get a decent alt-tab, Karabiner so you can remap ctrl+c/v to avoid twisting your hands, and a Windows keyboard layout to not lose your muscle memory for braces and other special characters (that Apple doesn't print on the keyboard FFS), SizeUp for having Windows shortcuts to move your windows around without a mouse - and that's it. A Mac that gets enough of the Windows muscle memory to make the transition pretty painlss.