It is usually much slower than a direct connection or a commercial VPN.
Also law enforcement, spy agencies and criminals all run public nodes to get lucky and grab as much data on you as possible. So you should never use TOR for unencrypted websites. But I’d say the same should be assumed when using a commercial VPN.
If you’re using your computer for work and can’t afford to spend some time figuring out how to do something that would be second nature for you on Windows, you shouldn’t switch. It would probably be more expensive than just buying a Windows license.
That said, you shouldn’t expect too many problems. You can try out your Word templates right now in Libre Office. Or just run the web version of Microsoft Office in Linux. Video codecs are usually just one command away.
In terms of what distribution to choose, I would choose something popular that’s stable and comes with sane defaults. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE Leap.
The main difference for a newbie will probably be how to install software. On Linux you usually don’t go to the manufacturers website and download an installer. Instead you go to your software center and search there for what you need. Similar to the App Store and Play Store on phones.
www really doesn’t matter and has nothing to do with the quality of a website. It used to be that servers would use the www subdomain so that they could be told apart from their mailservers (which would use smtp) and other servers they might have.
Nowadays this isn’t really needed. Most websites can be accessed with and without the www. The www is usually just used out of tradition and because it makes a domain look more like a web address for the masses.
The ambient temperature needs to be significantly lower than body temperature though, because your body is constantly generating heat that has to be dissipated. 36 °C is too hot for a human for long stretches of time.
Edit: And the post doesn’t seem to be about ambient temperature at all.
I have a T580 with nVidia graphics. Repairability is great. You can find a manual with step-by-step instructions for every part online.
But the thermals in that thing are awful. Especially on Linux and doubly so with the GPU. It has some stupid on-lap detection which heavily throttles the system to not burn the user. Up until a few years ago there wasn’t a driver for Linux so it always defaulted to on-lap-mode. But even worse, the GPU has some hardcoded 70° limit and it throttles down to the lowest clockrate when it reaches that. And it reaches that quickly because CPU and GPU share a heatpipe.
Nowadays I just run it on the integrated Intel graphics on Wayland and it’s great. But it would be cool if I could use the GPU that is at least theoretically able to run Doom 2016 at 30 fps. But practically it struggles with Quake 3.
It’s just a shame that you probably won’t know about these kinds of problems on a new laptop because people only notice them after a few months to years.
I feel like it’s kind of the same in other meme communities like 9gag and reddit. Reposts upon reposts upon reposts, with the occasional funny new thing.
Topical meme communities are sometimes a bit better with this.
My favourite book is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. My edition has a foreword about how Lewis Carroll wasn’t really a pedophile. He just had so many pictures of naked kids, spent so much time with them and wanted to marry the real Alice while she was young solely because he had soooo much love for children. Not in a creepy way at all. No no, not at all creepy.