

OP is cute thinking they be programming in the evenings after a full day of rafting.
OP. Just enjoy living outside of the computer. If you really must make a data memento, make the simplest possible recording device for your sensors. Then explore that data when you’re back home. There will be plenty of time when there be no starlit skies and friends around a campfire.
Others have already answered your questions, so I’ll just drop in my anecdotal experience to moving over my desktop to Linux last year. I tried a few different distros but settled with Fedora KDE edition. It works with everything exotic in my laptop out of the box, except for the gyro that doesn’t work with anybody else either. The desktop feels familiar and is easy to customize. I tried to like Gnome and variants but it is really settled on The Gnome Way of doing everything. Fedora is a fresh experience from previous attempts of going full Linux desktop with Ubuntu and even Mint. The GUI for software and package management is neat and includes native packages, flatpak both the fedora builds and mainline. Some minor things are not quite there but I believe that will be the Linux experience forever and I’m okay with it. I recommend to try it.