But I think what makes a usable Linux distro is the community, for two reasons. With more people around you can find solutions to your problems. And also, the big distro and its features are less likely to be discontinued, which can easily happen in pro bono projects and really sucks.

I'm on Ubuntu, but touched Fedora and Arch too. Omarchy looks great, and I really like the systematic approach they took about documentation. I'm not quite sure what they talk about customisation though, pretty much all the distros are customizable to the extent you can make one distro from another.

I can imagine what you will find the most annoying is the absence if MS Office and all these niche office tools. Coding on Linux is lovely and thats why people have it. But I recently spent a day making my Czech electronic signature work🙃

VSCode works great, although I'm not entirely sure about all the integrative functionalities, cause I tend to things directly in bash rather than through VSCode. Git is more straightforward than on Windows I would say, after all it was originally developed as a Linux tool.

If you open unix terminal and start RStudio from there, it will open you an independent session. Quite commonly used on Mac and Linux, dunno if there is any workaround for Windows, but perhaps PuTTy would handle this?