Nice write up, I enjoyed reading this! 15-20 years ago I would have loved nix and dumping hours into configuring every little detail.
I'm at the point now where I just want a distro I can install in 10-20 mins, copy over a couple of dot files, install a few apps, and be up and running.
I use mine as my main desktop pc. I've put cachyOS on it (handheld edition).
It depends on what software you need to run though. I'm a programmer so Linux for me is great but it might not support all the software you currently use.
I still have my old laptop, again running cachyOS, for sitting on the couch or going portable. I have tried using the deck on its own sitting in a dock with a Bluetooth mouse and KB. It works fine but the screen is very small so I prefer the laptop.
You could maybe try dual booting your laptop with a beginner friendly distro like Ubuntu, fedora, or bazzite (if you want gaming) to dip your toe in the water before fully diving in.
I'm still a bit sceptical over LLMs but I've used copilot for line code completion for a few years now.
More recently I've started playing about with agents. I've been using avante.nvim for a couple of months with Claude and quite like it. The setup was a bit of a faff but it works quite well and has support for the more mainstream agents.
Over the last few days I've started trying out augment code which has a neovim plugin. Still on the fence about that one.
I'm no expert when it comes to any of this but this is what I've been messing about with. Hope it's useful!
As an amateur radio operator, I can confirm this as factual. Over.