100% and I’m a software developer and have been for ~30 years. Good QA people know how to find regression and bugs _that you didn’t think about_ which is the whole reason why it shouldn’t be under “engineering” and that it should exist. One of the QA people I work with currently is one of my favorite people. They don’t always make me happy (in the moment) with their bugs or with how they decide to break the software, but in the end it makes a better, more resilient product.
I'll add that Libre Office can be great but if you already have an ecosystem you like, most of those have online editors too which can handle most of the average user needs.
Oh wow. That's wide open then, just about any of them. I run Mint on older mac hardware (happily cruising along on an 11" MacBook Air), I'm a sucker for Ubuntu's default look and feel a lot of the time - and they have a pretty large user community (as do all the major distros), and love Fedora too.
One note - a lot of the distros are Debian based (Mint/Ubuntu/etc.) vs. Red Hat (Fedora, Asahi - M1/2 Apple hardware Fedora, etc.) vs. Arch Linux.
If you're just getting started it's probably easier to get into the Debian world, but I'd advise you to dip your toes in other distros too unless you just deeply fall in love with your first pick.
(I have my 80 year old neighbor happily running Mint on their old computer to save them from having to buy a new Windows machine.)
this. despite all the ghost stories and war stories. it’s how apple sells you the watch to save you from that bear attack or that time you got trapped somewhere.
the stories are real, and in some cases you may need it — in most cases you don’t. and it clearly doesn’t always protect you.
contractors, "specialists", etc. who never took the time to read how CORS works and how simply you can handle a list of allowable sites, etc.
it's only complicated until you take the 5-10 minutes to properly understand what happens where. if you don't know, go do it now.