I'm using Mint Cinnamon which I chose because at the time a few years ago it looked like the most windows-like GUI. I'm on version 19 and think it's up to 21 now. Like with cameras, I'm reluctant to mess with something that's working, but I'll be forced into upgrading someday because newer browser versions won't run on it, and more and more web sites won't work with older browsers. There's a bit of a learning curve but after getting past that it's totally easy to use.
Why not Mac? I'm somewhat familiar because I have to use one from time to time. One reason is I didn't want to buy new hardware, and another is I very occasionally boot into win 10 to run something that won't run on win 7 or linux. The windows emulator on linux is pretty impressive, but there are a few things I've run into that work only on native windows. The other thing about Mac for me is that it feels to me too much consumer-oriented and I want the OS to be just a platform to run apps on.
I'm on Linux Mint 22.3 with Kernel: Linux 6.8.0-136-generic just now, been on Mint for quite a few years.
It's easy to use, stable, with a good set of tools available for those 'research tasks'.
** edit ** On the rare occasion I might need Windows - I just boot up a virtual instance with Oracle VirtualBox.