I just switched from the sole IT guy at small/med business, about 50 employees, to a much larger one. I didn’t experience the issues you have with collaboration but it’s probably mostly the lack of use in my environment, meaning less chances for things to fuck up.

You nailed it. Too often when I search for an answer to an issue, someone comes in and links to the arch wiki. The wiki is great and full of information, but it doesn’t have answers for specific cases. Sometimes I just need someone to tell me which parameter I need, or to tell me my formatting is fucked up or something. I’m not a Linux expert and trying to understand what configs do what and all of the options needed all at the same time is a lot. Forums are a place to ask questions and discuss solutions, but my experiences at least with Arch have not been that.

I also use libre when I need it, but I think Office apps not being around, warranted or not, will be a disqualifier for some people. The web apps work well, but for a power user, it might not be the ideal experience.

I jumped all in least December just to get away from Windows. I went Arch because I like a challenge and I thought it would fast track learning how to Linux. I work IT so I’m skilled with Windows and software in general. Once I got it setup, which took a while, I haven’t had too many issues, or at least not many more than I had with Windows. Most of them have been related to hibernation, which I just disabled, and Wayland with Nvidia. It struggles remembering positions when I disable and re-enable monitors, since I use the same station for work. Other than that, it runs so much better than better, faster, and more efficient than Windows.

If you want to be a power user, the sky is the limit to what you can do, or go with a stable, user friendlier distro like Ubuntu or Mint, where the out of box experience is fairly intuitive. If Linux shipped stock on laptops, most people would assume Windows got different and be none the wiser. Not having native MS Office apps is also going to be a deal breaker for a lot of people.

I last purchased a 2080ti, so I will probably ride that comfortably for another couple of years, but I window shop new AMD cards sometimes. I could probably convince myself to buy one even though it’s unnecessary, but I use and love my mini PC case, and the newest cards are too long to fit. I really hope smaller high-end GPUs becomes a trend to push innovation in that direction. Kind of like how phones just kept getting thinner for the longest time, I want GPUs to fight for shortest.