Yep, we got my wife the Mini in 2020 and it's been really good to her since, we got my kid m2 iPadPro, she loves it and it's now her daily driver as well. I'm the old holdout, building my boxes and repairing them since I was 16 has made it very difficult to even think of switching to non-end-user serviceable model. My music is strongly based in Mac software and environment, so for that I"m stuck there. Apple silicon has continued to be surprisingly attractive, and seems to be stable. Although I disagree with Cook about customers not caring about their processor specs, I've been abusing my processor cores for 30 yeas.
I like the Linux idea and actually had that thought this afternoon. I haven't tried it since the late 90's when I tried to replace WinME too. With an 11-cd iso of Slackware that took 3 days to download and about an hour or two to burn to disk.
I found that about half my hardware wasn't recognized yet because it was too new of a machine, so I went to Win2000-beta because it matched the upgrade going on in my networking classes and I later got Win2kPro for free from my professor.
What are the good Linux distribs these days?