No, I am like you.  Didn't get into chatting until well after the adolescent stage where most trolling seems to occur.  (At least that is what I am inferring from the article...No offense to any adolescent is intended).

I too have been on this journey for a while.  I personally like Mint Linux.  It is a spinoff of Ubuntu, but has access to a larger database of drivers out of the box (so to speak) since it also has some proprietary drivers.  They also have rendered a version of the SLED SLAB interface, which is nice as well.  They just released version 3.0 (Cassandra) and are working on a KDE version of Cassandra due out in the near future.

Hmmm...For the Office apps, probably not unless they are running truly massive applications for the products (e.g. Full encyclopedias in Word, a very large database, or Excel running tons of macros and/or calculations).  The GIS systems I have no experience with, so I don't know how valuable they would find the extra memory.

Your best bet would likely be to download some sort of performance monitor and see where the system bottlenecks are.  I have used Perfmon from Systernals in the past.  It is not the most user friendly, but it does get the job done.  There is another I used, but I can't remember the name.  It was more pictorial, so it was more meaningful to me.  If you search the net a bit, you get hundreds of hits, but I still can't find it...