>>There are two things from M$ I still use: skype and fox (on linux, both). And there's very little use I find for skype now, just to stay in touch with the two out-of-town daughters, and perhaps bi-weekly to say hi to the old gang from the last gig.
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>Which Linux do you prefer?

Played with Ubuntu on my desktop (first a few years in a VM on W7, then reversed roles, then just Ubuntu) and Mint on a small laptop. Haven't tried others so I can't say anything.

Just one recommendation: if you're not into exploring the cutting edge features, stay with a long term support build. For Ubuntu, that's 18.04. The annoying unfinished things are small and few and far between, but had I known that I could avoid them, I would have. Also, you have a choice of the graphical elements to use, or rather the shell - there's Unity, there's Wayland, and a few others. I've reverted to Unity even though it's not as fresh, because it best combines a toolbar plus searchbox to launch apps or documents (plus classic menu button somewhere on the upper toolbar). Which means I can completely live without icons on desktop, which are a nonsense, IMO.

The best feature of Linux is that if anything goes wrong, it's very easy to find a fix - most often it's just one or two lines that you copy from a webpage and paste into a terminal session (aka command prompt window). There's no advertising, and no hundreds of sales pitch articles with things being called the same but meaning something else, as is common with M$ stuff. Usually the solution is on page 1 of the search (and I'm using StartPage, not straight google, so it filters out most of the crap - but even before that, it behaved the same).