Help me move from Mac to Linux

I am a professional engineer who has been almost exclusively in the Apple world for 23 years and for various reasons I am trying to move to Linux full-time. Over the years I have become quite proficient on the CLI and used various flavors of Linux and but never managed to permanently switch from MacOS; there were always various software-related blockers I couldn't resolve. Still haven't decided on a distro or DE, but likely Unity, GNOME 3, or XFCE in Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

I'm quite productive in MacOS and have been researching Linux replacements or equivalents for all my tricks. I've managed to replicate most, but some have me stuck. Here is the list of productivity-enhancers that I need help replicating in Linux:

• Miller columns in a file browser. Navigating a complex filesystem with a GUI is slow and awkward without a Miller Column viewing mode. As far as I can tell, only pantheon-files has this, and I don't want to use ElementaryOS. Edit: technically you can use pantheon-files in Arch, Ubuntu, and probably other distros, too.
• iMessage, screen sharing, and FaceTime video and audio calling from the desktop--or something like them that doesn't require everyone I know to switch to Linux. These are super handy.
• In addition to launching apps and performing systemwide full-text searching, MacOS Spotlight can also perform mathematical calculations, look up words, and convert units (e.g. type in "150f" and it shows "65.56 ˚C"). The Dash feature in Unity and Gnome 3 can do app launching, full-text searching, mathematical calculations, and dictionary lookup, but I haven't found anything to make them do unit conversion. XFCE can do it with xfce4-calculator-plugin and xfce4-dict. No other desktop environments that I have found have anything close to these. It's almost like I want a direct Wolfram Alpha interface on the desktop. That would be rad.
• Manipulate open files by the icon in the window's titlebar. Through this proxy, I can rename an open file, move it or make a symlink to it, or open its parent directory.
• Ability to quickly remove the background from an image. I can do this in a minute or two with GIMP (mostly because it takes forever to open), but it's a cumbersome process. On MacOS, I can do this in literally five seconds with the build-in image viewer app. Proof: http://bit.ly/2eUK1lL
• Non-decimal scale factors for HiDPI displays. a scaling factor of 2 usually makes everything absurdly large. 1.25x or 1.5x would be perfect. Edit: Works in Ubuntu!
• - "Creation date" field/file attribute support. Apparently EXT4 has this but people keep objecting to support being included in the kernel, for idiotic reasons. Any resolution?

Does anyone know of ways to fix/solve/improve these sticking points?

submitted by /u/PointiestStick to /r/linux
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