Especially in a middle school math/physics setting, I would expect reasonable units. Otherwise, how would kids understand the relationship between force and acceleration? Do you use mile / hour / min for the acceleration due to gravity as well? Do you have a funky replacement for Newton too?
Just install and try to resolve all your issues (if any) in a dualboot. That way you can always go back to Windows if something doesn't work. But if your experience is anything like mine, you'll find that 99% works either out of the box or after some minimal configuration. The only notable exception for me are online games that insist on intrusive anti-cheat software (e.g. BattleEye) and choose not to support Proton/Wine on Linux. Curse you, Escape from Tarkov!
I didn't get it for a solid 2 minutes before realizing you have to pronounce it wrong for the joke to work
That's not the problem. Coming from metric, I expected m s-2 for acceleration. The imperial units for distances are weird enough in their own right – but using two different units of time for the two time derivatives is truly unholy.
The natural representation would be the transient solution u(t) or i(t). Harmonic solutions are merely a special case, for which it turned out complex numbers were useful (because of the way they can represent rotation). They certainly serve a purpose there, but imo this is not an instance of 'complex numbers appearing in nature'.
But that is hardly a 'natural occurence' of complex numbers - it just turned out that they were useful to represent the special case of harmonic solutions because of their relationship with trig functions.