Respectfully, Defector is about the furthest thing from a spam blog that you'll find on the internet, my dude/lady.
It was formed a few years back by writers fleeing the sinking ship that was Deadspin.
I'd encourage you to check out some of their other articles and judge for yourself.
Hi there! I'm you. My first computer was a TRS-80 in the early 80s, and my daily driver today is Debian (a flavor of Linux). I'm not an IT person, but I've had some skin in the game for a while.
You won't need to purchase a thing unless you have some weird/old hardware where drivers will be a challenge.
There are a million flavors ("distros") of Linux. The most straightforward ones to start with are probably Ubuntu and Mint.
Most Linux distros have a "live CD" version that you can "install" on a thumb drive. That allows you to take the entire OS for a test spin without changing anything on your "main" computer.
Nutty -- I was just chewing on that similarity myself.