You should be comparing the $500 hooker to actually having a girlfriend. Meeting a nice girl with good code quality is free. Maybe she doesn't always wear makeup and doesn't some of the big flashy features,but that can be a good thing too. She has nothing to hide, she won't tell you you have...
I used DispCalGui yesterday with success. Yes it asked me to do a manual calibration first because your screen at least has to be in the right vicinity for a proper calibration.
This was on Linux so I can't tell you what the Windows experience is like.
I did the eye-bal calibration on...
I've had both but Inkscape is by far my preference, not including price cause Illustrator isn't that expensive if you actually use it.
Between the two, you have what you need for logos. If you're more comfortable knocking something out in a raster program then do so and trace to vector after...
Might be the part where you explain what you want AFTER finding someone. Not to sound grumpy, but that's a bit like asking you to promise you won't get mad if I tell you something. ;-)
13.1 with KDE. I like XFCE as well but use a few of the KDE apps so thought "hey why not". Once I have it all configured how I like it, they are within a couple hundred megs of each other anyway. Yeah SUSE is pretty solid and BTRFS Snapshots are nice. I run Arch on my laptop with the same setup.
A note about the Keycool. I ordered one (Kc84) from MK and promptly returned it. The quality of the keys was very poor and it had a loose switch. I tend to avoid them now.
Edit: I should have said that the keys were backlit. I've read good things about their PBT keys.