Depends on your distro, I think.
drwho
If only for the sake of one's CV. Making your bones by having a couple of 0-days under your belt helps a lot of folks find jobs these days.
It is. That's why Wayland is being pushed so hard, it's a codebase that's actually maintainable, with hopefully some more modern design and engineering principles.
You can install more than one desktop environment at a time. Your login manager should let you pick which one you want to log into.
I'm running MATE on my laptop. It gives me what I need (a task bar, space for some instrumentation, the usual desktop functionality, a way to start applications) and nothing that I don't care about (wobbling windows, compiz, stuff like that). My DE is a tool; I use tools that don't get in my way because I have work to do.
I might give COSMIC a try in a few months, I haven't decided yet.
It's pretty nice. The REST API for running searches makes running SearxNG worth it, if nothing else.
When I could get away with it at work, I did.
In the last.. I want to say six or seven years, issuing Macbooks to sysadmins has been a common thing in the sectors I work in. Rather than put up with us going rogue and messing up license tracking by rebuilding our stuff with a distro of choice, management just throws OSX at the problem (us, we're the problem) because operationally it's close enough for our purposes.
It's not my choice or preference, but the money's green.
The true final exam would be writing code on an airgapped system.
This is endgame. The folks on top decided that there's no point in being surreptitious anymore and they're acting openly, because who can do anything about it?
"About to?"
We've been watching journalism die in realtime over the last decade. Jeff Bezos discarding all pretense the other day was just the latest in a long line of failures.
You can have them installed next to one another. Just like you can have Firefox and Links installed at the same time. Or twm and gnome3. It comes down to how much work you want for yourself.