Hi there @RetiredGuy Patrick welcome to this great community with so many helpful posters.
Hey I’m retired too – isn’t it great? Miss the humour of engineers and others at work.
Yes I too used UNIX for Pafec DOGS – Design Office Graphics System way back then.
You have been given good advice so far but could I suggest a different approach which worked so well for me and have since had difficulties getting VM to work.
It is blindingly simple: Just boot up with a demo distro DVD or USB stick and hey presto you are running your choice of distro and can look at it’s features or lack of them and decide later. 
Next reboot with another distro and compare back to back. Take a break and reboot as normal – as you were just running distros in RAM nothing has been altered in your computer at all.
I got all my distros free with magazine issues with reviews of them before checking what it’sFOSS and DistroWatch had to say. Also take a look at web pages of the FSF and GNU-Linux to see if they coincide with your mind set? I decided on Trisquel for an old HP G60 Notebook come laptop and use it daily such that Dell ubuntu 16.04 LTS is hardly used at all.
You may find this FOSS page and others useful… 
