In my experience people who really use excel are always going to need excel

That’s my experience too, unfortunately. LibreOffice is lagging too far behind O365 on features that you can reliably cooperate on spreadsheets across applications. Something like e.g. XLOOKUP is a fairly recent addition in Calc.

If you like Kubuntu because of apt and KDE, don’t be afraid of going Debian with KDE next time.

I love everything about Pop!_OS. Except the name, that I cannot stand.

I run Debian at home because “Microsoft evil”, but I kinda think the Windows 10 image we use at work is alright. I work at a Forbes 500 company with a huuuge IT department, so I’m guessing they’ve done well at setting up group policies or something to make a de-cluttered experience for us. At least I never see any ads or Bing bullshit, and the Start menu works like I expect from ye old days. I could never make W10 work just as sleek at home, so I gave up and moved to Linux.

That said, most developers here still use a local Linux VM for actual developing lol.