You’re much more likely to just restart than to shutdown and need to hit the power button. I don’t think I’ve shutdown my MacBook since I turned it on, or my Linux box either. IMO unless there’s a power outage you’ll never need to hit that button. Still dumb though but i can’t imagine this as a deal breaker.

$599 for this thing is an insane deal.

Reading books. There are some great books on programming out there. I would strongly recommend a A Players Guide to C#. It’s structure, practice problems, and explainations of the basics were far better than any free guide to programming that I’ve seen online. There are a lot of other great books out there too.

It also doesn’t matter too much about a book being outdated when you are only studying the fundamentals.

A lot of the stuff you read online has never been fact checked or edited for clarity. Some of it is great, but most of it is not.

Linux has decimated Windows in the server market. It would be unthinkable for a new project to use Windows server, even Azure assumes you want to use Linux.

There are lots of industrial applications where open source has dominated the market. As the end user you might not see it, but almost all software and digital infrastructure you use has open source components.

The new Apple silicon in the Mac lineup is the most exciting thing they have done in the PC space in more than a decade.

Have you used Java before? It’s not a big leap from Java to C#, most of the concepts are the same. At least C# is a memory safe language, although I’m not sure if you’re unfamiliar with the code base and languages if it really makes a difference which language you use here. Hopefully your coworkers can help hold your hand a bit here, this situation sucks.