You'll find most recommendations to newbies are for Ubuntu or Mint.
If you've never tried, you don't really know how much "twiddling" you'll have to do (prediction: not much).

Something I learned from the basecamp people: Private offices are a big of a logistic problem when your headcount varies, you want to rearrange things, etc.

Here's what they did. IMHO, second only to my own home office on the appeal scale.

https://basecamp.com/about/off...

Can you please elaborate on this? I'm wondering how you can tell. I've heard this from a few mechanics - that cars are now designed to last just past their warranty. Disappointing.

Am I the only one who sees in this trend just a huge explosion of single-use containers going right to the landfill?

Really cool in-browser visualizer of 5 different algorithms for solving this problem...

http://haseebq.com/n-queens-visualizer/

I'm showing 129MB, and slowly climbing - for several minutes now. Weird. Memory leak?

I can't believe you just typed that in. Maybe I'm missing a MathML extension or something. Either way, here it is typeset, if anybody's interested.
http://bit.ly/2lm0Da8

Erich, the Quadratic Formula is absolutely magic. I could convince you of that magic in a way you'd never forget, if you had a few hours.
More importantly, I'd ask you what about maths you were interested in learning - the exact opposite approach to the forced, institutionalized education that everybody but the students has been so enamored with for 100+ years.