A few years ago, after following the same path as you, I switched to Linux and never looked back.

I'd recommend KDE (e.g. Kubuntu) if you like out-of-the-box productivity, with built-in settings for pretty much everything useful, and a strong ecosystem of default apps.

How long should Apple keep 32 bit support? Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit Mac for a little over a decade, warned developers back in the 10.6 - 10.7 era and they cancelled 64 bit Carbon.

Should Apple also still maintain Classic MacOS support? PPC support? 68K support? As far as “no good reason” with as bad as Intel is falling behind ARM - especially Apple’s own ARM designs, it’s widely expected that Apple will move away from Intel to ARM in their consumer laptops. Apple dropped 32 bit support in their ARM chips two or three years ago.

Besides, every bit of code you can get rid of is less of a service area to support, maintain and for security vulnerabilities. The more than half dozen ways of defining a string in Windows has led to security vulnerabilities by itself.

Even MS dropped support for 16 bit apps in 64 bit Windows.

Ditto. I love my MBP, it's still tottering along after 10 years (!), but it's on its last legs. the keyboard fiasco had me thinking that maybe my next backpack computer might not be a Mac...and then here comes Catalina with no 32-bit support and App Store-onerous requirements to get software signed, and fuck that.

MS' Surface Books look pretty cool. Or maybe I'll just get a bigger backpack and tote my 17" gaming laptop around.

Try Windows. I migrated from Macbook to Windows PC and I like it. It's far from perfect as everything seems today, but it works for my needs.