Deanne

I suggest you don’t pull the trigger on everything just yet, or else you’ll get burnt out. Desktop environments aren’t dependent on the distro, just find some environments that look like mac os or the ones that you can configure to look and feel like mac os and use them on the distros that you want to try.

peppermint is fine, you can use it

including, but not limited to nvidia. network cards might be another issue. yes i know that there are open source alternatives and i most definitely choose foss where i can but people that just came from windows aren’t likely to care.

it’s not hard, but it only specifically consists of free software. that can be confusing and some hardware won’t work

the first two can be, but i don’t recommend trisquel to those coming from windows