I'm in IT too. My experience is that if you use Linux at home and Windows at work you just end up skilled at both. At one point I was even using a Macbook at work (wouldn't have even been a consideration if WSL was just a little better), using a Windows jump server or a VM for my Windows-y ops, and I became skilled at all 3 OS's.
All of that is to say that your skill won't decrease if Windows is still being used, especially if you're using it in a professional context.
Well as far as I understand, this discussion is about voting and not prosecution. A prosecutor's job is to seek the greatest penalty they think they can feasibly get, so of course they're going to focus on charges that carry the greatest penalty. A voter's job, in the context of presidential elections, is to choose between a series of power-hungry hyenas to lead the Executive branch of the government. Not voting is counter-productive and under the current system voting third-party is also counter-productive, so a voter has an incentive to consider all of the "crimes", and even the good sprinkled amongst them, and not tunnel-vision on the worst.
So debating the "lesser charges" could not be more relevant, because who you vote for matters and the government does a heck of a lot more than support Israel. If I follow your line of false equivalence, I can only envision 2 conclusions:
Yes, the current system is corrupt and is awful, and it needs to change, but in the meantime elections are still held and decisions are still made about things like education funding, women's bodily autonomy, trans rights, student debt, and so on and so on. Saying nothing else matters because the political parties that have a duopoly on power support Israel's genocide campaign is short-sighted at best. As far as I can tell what you're advocating for is voter apathy, and I fail to see how that's productive.
And nobody in this thread at least is arguing against that. You seem to have taken the position that because both parties support Israel in their genocide of Palestinians there can be no other measures worth judging them by. That they are equal. And the "both sides" argument is objectively a false equivalence. It's not as though a woman's bodily autonomy no longer matters because Israel is leading a genocidal campaign in Gaza, for instance.
It is precisely because there are other issues in the world and in the country that there is a lesser evil. Even if we disagree on degrees of "lesser" or even who is "lesser", everything is not so one dimensional as to be able to label both political parties as equally evil when there are other evils that need to be piled on and added to the scale. Ignoring those evils is ignoring the victims of those evils.
Not to be reductionist of the genocide in Gaza, it is undoubtedly evil and both parties deserve to be labeled as such for supporting it, but to speak as though that's the only issue in this world and the only yardstick we can use to measure both parties is itself reductionist. And the reason they maintain their power is that the system is so structured as to ensure it. And that's not to say there is nothing we can do about that (for one, elimination of FPTP voting), but as of the 2024 election the reality was that only one of those two parties would win. And to claim that recognizing that in itself is the sole cause of it is silly.
In the US there are only two party choices that matter. We are forced to vote for evil and must choose the lesser. I agree with you in principal but Trump is an especially egregious choice.
LinkedIn and Indeed mostly, though I do check my resume against the listing using stuff like jobscan.co to play the stupid match-the-keywords game to rank myself as high as possible. The response rate sucks but I do get responses, and I think shitty response rates for applications via job boards is kinda common in general. In my area (both geographically and career-wise I suppose) there are also plenty of recruiters looking for people to get in the door, which gets you past the AI gatekeeper. Though recruiter activity has slowed down in the past year and it's not a time of plenty anymore they're still around.
As with anything YMMV. So many variables, and surely some luck has played a part in my experience.
That's entirely dependent on experience. Low to no experience? Get certs. In today's age of AI powered resume screens, even with experience if what you're pursuing is a position lower on the totem poll then you will still need them to get through the AI. Probably want a higher-value cert than CompTIA if you wanna work in IT but don't want to stay trapped in the help desk (I'm talking a networking cert, a cloud cert, ITIL, etc). The most common career path is through the help desk but one doesn't need to stay there.
Once one gets a decent amount of experience certs don't really matter. In fact, I climbed up the early rungs of the IT ladder by selling my experience with stuff in my home lab and selling my ability to learn. I don't have a single cert and never have. I misrepresented nothing about myself, but I did need to eat some below-market-pay jobs at first to rack up real experience to sell. Nobody really cares about the cert, it's a knowledge industry and what matters is what you know and what you've done.
You got a lot of distro recommendations from across the spectrum and it's honestly hard to go wrong with any of them. It's mostly a matter of preference. As such I'll give you two pieces of advice:
Good luck! IMO getting into Linux for the first time is a fun journey. Enjoy it!