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Before jumping to Linux there are a few things that need consideration.

1. Are you in an office environment that uses Microsoft Active Directory?  If
so any *nux may prove more than a tad challenging.

2. *nix is as susceptible to malware as any other operating system.  The
community just refers to these things as root kits.  This is a headline from
2016 but I can assure you, things have not gotten better:

Linux Mint Website Hacked, ISOs Compromised With Backdoor:
https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-hacked/

3. For all its faults, and the Lord knows I am personally, and aggravatingly,
familiar with many, Microsoft is a commercial enterprise with millions of
customers and a fully staffed, if sometimes misguided and frequently misled,
development and support organisations.  Outside of major vendors the *nixes are
dependent upon the continued interest and good will of the project teams behind
each package that makes up a distro. Surprisingly this often devolves down to
one individual.

When there is a major vendor like Redhat behind a distro then you get greater
security and support.  The price paid is that the software packages on stable
distos are often one or more releases out of date.

But, Redhat does not run most, or even very many, of the software projects that
are vital to its distro's functionality.  And ego plays an overlarge role in
the viability of these projects as exemplified by idempiere, pulseaudio,
systemd, and LibreSSL.  There are dozens, if not hundreds of similar examples.

What that means is that when going to *nix you must be prepared to deal with
the hamster cage of endless updates.  Unlike MS, projects in *nixland typically
do not release simple bugfixes.  They often release new features and deprecate
and remove old ones, whenever they do a release.  That means to get fix A on
product B may mean that feature Y on program C no long exists, or works
differently, or does not work at all anymore.

Likewise, project versioning is all over the map.  All you can tell from
version numbers now is the order in which they were released.  The
Major.minor.patch system is not universally used (Chrome/Firefox) and where it
is used it is often in an idiosyncratic fashion so that you cannot tell whether
or not a new version contains all of the bit you need from the old.

Finally, well not really but I am stopping after this one, on a *nix box it is
critical that you understand how the firewall works and never, never, connect
it to the public Internet without one that is: a. turned on and operating; and
b. properly configured.

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James B. Byrne                mailto:[log in to unmask]
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
Canada  L8E 3C3
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