Spectres

Thanks for all your hard work, you have created an amazing community and risen to the many challenges that come from the kind of exponential growth this instance has seen.
Take care of yourself!
Thank you!

I used Manjaro and Ubuntu for a while before settling on Garuda.

Garuda is Arch based* (like SteamOS) and offers the latest software immediately, but also has a built in snapshot system that allows you to roll back your system if any of the updates break something (Snapper automatically makes a snapshot of your system before it updates).
There are GUI apps for editing system settings (which isn’t a thing on all distros! sometimes you’re just editing a text config file), as well as a gaming app specific installer (Wine, Proton, Lutris, Steam, Retroarch etc)
I’ve used Teams, but never attempted Office365 so I can’t help you there, but it sounds like you can access it via a web interface.
I code using VS Codium, the open source branch of VS Code, but I’m not sure that Visual Studio is working on Linux. There are also Microsoft specific extensions in the VS Code Extension library that won’t work without third party workarounds.

Since you’re already familiar with virtualbox you can spin up some of the recommended distros. and see which one you like best.
I tried Endeavour, but found that it was Garuda with fewer of the helper apps that I was used to.
Coming from MacOS/Windows, I liked having the extra apps and pre-built functionality.
I could absolutely customize it to be whatever I wanted, and some people prefer more bare-bones distros, but I found Garuda was what I was looking for straight out of the box. (except for the slightly garish theme).
I haven’t seen anyone recommend Nobara yet, but that’s one you should check out if gaming is a concern.

If you haven’t checked out KVM/QEMU and virt-manager, I’d strongly recommend giving them a look. I set up Windows 10 and MacOS VMs that launch from icons on my dock any time I want to use Mac or Windows. If they were on discrete disks then I could get near native performance.
If you have more than one drive in your machine you don’t even need to give up Mac or Win to go Linux.
I set it up on a laptop, so I didn’t have a discrete disk or GPU, which impacted performance, but my plan for my desktop is to run Linux on the bare metal and use QEMU for any Mac or Microsoft products.

*I use Arch, btw

There has been a high speed Bell connection just a few kilometres out of range of my neighbourhood for 10 years. After a few years of begging for it to be extended and hearing that it was coming in ‘3-6 months’ I gave up hoping that I would ever have a terrestrial connection.

This is awful news for exeryone.
Xplornet, now Xplore, are an absolute shit company.
I cannot overstate that.
I was a customer for 7 years before Starlink became available, they promised 25mbps and they gave between 0.2 and 4 (at best).
Their service didn’t work when it was cloudy, in my area OR IN NEW BRUNSWICK!!!
Every service worked well for about 2-3 weeks before they oversold it and speed dropped.
Gmail would sometimes not have enough bandwidth to load.
GMAIL!!!
Let alone Youtube, Twitch etc.
Ping was 500ms at best, usually around 700ms.
Gaming was impossible between the ping and bandwidth.
AND THEY WERE A DOLLAR MORE EXPENSIVE A MONTH THAN STARLINK!!!
I hate this company, when you googled them the number one result used to be XplornetSucks, a forum for users to vent about how shit the company and its service is.
Probably why they rebranded.
Don’t take my word for it, look up a testimonial by anyone who has ever been unfortunate enough to have them as their only option for internet service.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel to give the appearance of availability and competition, and then marking it up so high that you would think it was a luxury service.
Xplore can rot, I’ll never forget the thousands of dollars that they took from me, the hours I spent waiting on the phone with customer service, scraping ice and snow off the dish, going to the library when I needed half decent internet even though I was paying Xplornet $150/month, running into their tiny bandwidth caps and having to beg to get an extension so I could work because I had to download some large files or forgot to turn off updates in Steam.
Starlink is cheaper, I can play games again, sometimes I have 3/4 HD streams running at once, uploading actually works, and quickly, I put the dish up ~a year and a half ago and haven’t touched it since, the only times it hasn’t worked reliably have been during electrical/thunder storms, and even then it still works.
Damn do I hate Xplore.