The self-sustaining project has been years in preparation, and about three in action as I said. With that said, since we took the jump, it has been hampered by numerous things out of our control (but hasn't hampered our dedication):

• Our niece was killed in a mass murder by her estranged husband (12th day after moving way up north, the day after I had my satellite Internet installed)
• We were evacuated for an extended time by forest fires
• Our daughter was held in an LA county jail on four felony charges (eventually all were dismissed)
• We were buried under 4-1/2' of snow
• Electric outage were very frequent, ~five times a week, averaging about six hours, with at least four outages lasting 24+ hours (solar and gas powered generators to run core stuff)
• We're surrounded by black and grizzly bears, eagles, hawks, deer, wolves, coyotes, bobcat, mountain lion, big horn sheep, mountain goats, and fish galore, and birds oh my (hummingbirds particularly). We also have lots of moose, including Theo, who was in his first year of being on his own. We *NEVER* feed or interacted directly with him (or any other wildlife!), but he would wander closely. My business/your business kind of relationship. He'd slurp the bark off of our willow and apple trees. Theo was consistent, there every day at dawn, often sleeping nearby, and would go away at night. Saw him once fend off a bear, 10' from my back porch
• Add any other very odd thing here, and we probably dealt with it

When I re-use my saved IDE configs, nothing changes. It works within all of their IDEs actually. For example, their PyCharm is the IDE specifically for Python programming (although all of their IDEs will work with Python, this one is specific to it), but I use my saved config between that, the IDEA IDE, CLion (for C/C++) etc, you get the point.

Upgrading is easy. It can be done individually, and once upgraded, on next start, it'll ask you if you'd "like to use a new config" or "copy config from existing installation". I've never noticed any real changes look-wise with the IDEs after an upgrade, and I've been using intelliJ for at least five years. Sometimes you'll see something minor, but you'd have expected that already though, because you've already read the release notes prior to upgrading :) They've also got the Jetbrains Toolbox, that monitors all of their software installed on your system, and you can use that GUI tool to see what has updates available, and update select (or all) of your installed applications.

All in all, very great experience. ...and yes, I use the same IDEs on both nix and win (with the same config), and they act, look, feel and behave exactly the same. Honestly, you'd never tell the difference between OSs.