Personally, I am waiting for the discussion for Year of the FreeBSD Desktop. I have had Year of the Linux Desktop on my personal gear every year since about 2002. :)

Well, no autocrats unless one moves into a HOA. Then the HOA can tell one what one can and cannot do with one's own property. ;) Not in CA myself, but we moved out to "the sticks" and have a local store about 5.5 miles away, also in "the sticks", that is basically built around the old community General Store idea. We can get groceries, prescriptions filled, and "dry goods" there. What they don't have we can order online and have shipped. I WFH for my tech job, and have to show up for in-person meetings about 3 to 4 times per year. I never want to go back to residing in a city or having to be in an office 5 days a week.

I am really a Unix / FreeBSD nerd. I cut my Unix teeth in my late 20's on SCO Xenix in the 1980's [Yep, I'm old. ;)] and have touched several different Unixen since then. That said, I began using Linux starting with Caldera Linux back in the late 1990's. I have been through a bunch of different distributions on the .rpm and .deb sides of the aisle. I settled on Devuan Linux when they released their 1.0 distribution and currently have a NUC with Devuan and the MATE desktop. Using that right now to browse /. as a matter of fact. All I can say is it does all I need and was quite easy to set up. Of course, YMMV.

Oh, and I haven't used "Windows" in years . My current @work systems are a FreeBSD workstation in the lab at my company's DC and an Apple MacBook. :)

Uh, non sequitur much?

My thought as well.

Oh, yeah, for payroll my company moved to ADP as well a few years back.

Yep. The company where I work is not even all that large with ~2,000 employees. It uses Oracle.

Yup. Either vi or vim plain text with storage on my "cloud" VPS or Dropbox if I need to get to the document from "anywhere". Has always worked as expected and is ubiquitous across most Unix / Linux systems, and even available on Windows now. Why /some/ distributions default to nano (spit) will always be a mystery to me. ;)

That "numerous improvements over XP" may be true in your world, but it is hard to see from an end-user perspective. I am looking at a just recovered "Vista Home Premium" Toshiba laptop with 1.73 GHz "Genuine Intel(R) CPU", 1 GB RAM and a 120 GB HD sitting on my desk running a defrag before being returned. This is a fresh install to "factory condition" with updates applied to clean it up for transfer to someone else from the original owner. It is DOG SLOW, even with a "factory condition" reinstall just completed to a wiped HD! Another laptop with generally the same specs was in here for service previously with XP sp3 on it. From this (my) end-user perspective as a "PC fix-it" guy, XP installed to "factory condition" with updates applied was much faster on similar hardware. Getting stuff done faster with XP and not having to wait on the spinning hourglass is "better" as far as I am concerned. Of course, 7 would not do well on such "low-spec" hardware either. :)