This has been my experience as well.

It doesn’t help that, prior to 2023 (I believe), Microsoft’s OpenSSH fork simply did not recognize ProxyJump. I administered a server behind a bastion, which meant every Mac and Linux user could ssh in. Windows users had to use some strange program like PuTTy.

Fastmail, 100%. Reasons:

• “Encrypted email” only works between encrypted providers. ProtonMail and Tutanota are both very inconvenient, and all I want is an email that’s not scanned for marketing.
• Since 2018, ProtonMail kept getting worse, especially with the recent AI stuff. Dodged bullet, IMO.
• $6/month = Custom domains, and any amount of emails under those domains. I can send and receive from any domain xxx@yyy [dot] lynndotpy [dot] dev, for example.
• CalDav and CardDav provider = Contacts, calendar, and reminders sync. Works perfectly on iOS too, if you like that.

It replaced my finnicky NextCloud for half the cost.

Learning Linux was probably the very best thing for my career.

The fact that I use Linux as my primary OS has been a positive in almost every interview I’ve been in as the interviewee. Linux has been used everywhere I’ve been, and that represents a huge amount of upskilling they can skip.

As an interviewer, I’d say that developers who use Linux generally understand their development stack better.

This has been my experience since 2009 :) I’ve been using Linux for 15 years now, across four laptops and two desktop PCs, and I’ve only had a few rare hardware issues. (Sleep not working properly, BIOS update overwriting GRUB, and Wacom tablet mapping needing to be fixed. That’s it.)

The hardest part is almost always the installation, and that’s almost always attributable to Microsoft Bullshit.

I’m happy you’re having a good time :)