I still remember hearing about a Ring 0 exploit in Windows (I may be misremembering, though) that required Ring 0 access. I think if an attacker has access to Ring 0, you’re already screwed anyway.

I can already imagine the scaremongering headlines.

The only way to make the bastards responsible stop is jail time. The companies and the people who run them have more than enough money to pay the fines.

33% Green, 33% Labour, 33% Lib Dems.

Sounds about right.

None of the three things you listed need the CLI, except for a couple of distros. Most distros can use the GUI for those.

Gimp and Blender are both available on Linux. VS Code is on Linux (most coding stuff is on Linux). Linux file explorers work pretty well (Dolphin, for example). I’d recommend Kubuntu, KDE neon or Linux Mint for the distro, all are pretty similar in appearance to Windows. It won’t take much learning with them.

Wine can run most of those, not all. You can still dual boot Windows if you need to (VMs are an option, but they aren’t always the best).