1. The main fundamental differences are the package manager, the way the system is setup (partitons, immutable distros), and possibly software you don’t want installed. Aside from that, you can install basically anything on any distro. Some do make it easier than others to install new things though.
2. Canonical (Ubuntu and direct spinoffs) and Manjaro are the ones I recommend avoiding, because their marketing and “general sentiment” goes against my opinions of the distros/maintainers. However, switching Linux distros (especially to another one with a similar base) is not nearly as daunting of a task as switching from Windows to Linux. Some corporate distro owners might pull something like advertising, but there’s often an easy way out (except with snaps).
3. As for the distros you mentioned, Fedora, Mint, and Pop!_OS are all good options. Mint and Pop!_OS are both based on Ubuntu, which could cause issues in the future, but Mint is working on a Linux Mint Debian Edition. Aside from that, my general recommendation is to stay close to upstream. Distros further downstream tend to break more often (think spinoffs of Ubuntu, Arch derivatives, forks of Fedora, etc). There are exceptions to this rule, like when a distro stays close to upstream.
4. In recent times, it should all be working okay! We’re “in the middle of a long time switch” from X11 to Wayland. Those are protocols for the way applications display to the screen. X11 is lacking features, like HDR, and can have issues with “weird” multimonitor setups. Wayland is being actively developed, multimonitor works fine, and HDR is available for some desktop environments (like KDE or GNOME). Not all distros default (or support) Wayland yet, so if you need HDR, pick a distro with KDE or GNOME as its desktop environment.
5. This situation has gotten more complex with Wayland (one of the pain points still being worked on). The features you get partially depend on which DE (or wayland compositor) you choose. Previously on X11, this wasn’t the case. For Wayland DEs, KDE is moving relatively fast, with new features nearly every release. GNOME is moving slower, but should cover most people’s needs. As for tinkering around with your choice of UI/DE, there’s many options available, but KDE offers by far the easiest customization possible (it’s all in the settings menu). There’s more complex, more customizable options available, but I wouldn’t recommend them as a starting point.
6. As for nvidia, it has been progressively getting better, but there are still nvidia specific issues that come up from time to time. There’s not really much you can do about it, aside from following changelogs and updating when the thing you’re running into is fixed.

Now for your list of applications:

• Gaming (through steam) works great! There’s definitely still issues, but I’d argue there’s not really more issues than on Windows, just different issues. There is one category of games that’s still problematic, games with kernel level anticheat. They do not and likely will never play on Linux. Other launchers (EA Play, Ubisoft Connect, Epic) can have their own issues, although there’s often fixes/workarounds available rather quickly.
• Firefox works just fine on Linux.
• VLC works great too, although there are other options available that are more modern or better in some ways. It’s up to you to decide what to use.
• Spotify works just fine, there’s always the website in case nothing else works, but the “app” as a flatpak or even through repos works too.
• Discord has some issues accepting that Linux exists, but have recently started making some changes with that. Most people either use Disocrd in the webbrowser (to prevent too much system access), or run a custom client like Vesktop.
• Godot works great on Linux, I don’t have much else to say about it tbh.
• Visual Studio Code too, it’s basically just a webapp. Some integrations might be slightly different (like the terminal), but otherwise stuff “just works”.
• Git was quite literally made for Linux first (as a project, but also as a platform to run on).
• Photoshop is going to be difficult to get running, if it works at all. You can certainly try, but it might be a good option to find an alternative for this one.
• Audacity works great
• Davinci Resolve does have a Linux version, but the free version can be picky about codecs. There’s always tools to reencode your inputs, but it’s not always convenient drag and drop.
• Misc. tinkering is going to be much more fun, as things in Linux ecosystems are often open source. Not only can you mess around with tools that already exist, you can edit them, or even make your own. Some “niche” hardware might give you issues (like iirc the goxlr, or some capture cards).

Good to note this example is from 2022-08-30. Despite its “reputation” among some, Arch doesn’t break that often by itself.

Not OP, but modularity. An X11 WM is just a WM. You can choose compositor, bar, shortcut daemon, etc. With Wayland, a single implementation holds most of that, and more. If you need a specific feature from your display server, you are stuck on WMs that support it. This has forced me to use KDE for Wayland on my main workstation, and although it works well, it’s not my prefered WM/workflow.

Alongside that, no clones of several X11 WMs exist. bspwm for example. Riverwm exists, but has major limitations, and the workflow isn’t the same.

For example, how they handle SSL certificates expiring. For one, any production website should have auto renewal setup. Even ignoring that, a certificate renewal should cost 1-2 minutes of time (once the website host is aware). Instead of setting up auto renewal, or just renewing manually, Manjaro has (in the past) told users to turn back their clocks for a day to trust the expired certificate.

Not only is comparing these not the point (CalyxOS has a different purpose than GrapheneOS), the chart is heavily biased towards Graphene. Take for example the whole section on privacy. They list Graphene specific features, note that Graphene has them, and make other roms look bad for “not having them”, or even provide incorrect information. “Storage Scopes” and “Contact Scopes” for example, two Graphene features, intended to make closed source apps “happy” with giving them fake permissions. Although there’s definitely a use for this feature, being much more FOSS focused, Calyx provides the option to isolate non-foss apps into a work profile. This is effectively doing something very similar, although more limited to the user. Or the “Tracking through Android Advertising ID?” column, which lists only Graphene as “Not part of the system”, and everything else as “Randomized ID”. Graphene runs the official Google play services “in a sandbox”, without modifying or patching anything significant. This also means Google’s implementation of Advertising ID is being used. This is not randomized, and worse for privacy than anything using MicroG. Calyx MicroG and Graphene Google Play Services are both opt in, yet the chart favors Graphene by claiming it doesn’t have the anti-feature.

This person does not understand open source or Android whatsoever. They talk a decent bit about “default installed apps”, without properly understanding what most of them even are. They complain about some apps “being out of date” when installing CalyxOS, calling it “concerning” that they’re not on the latest version out of the box, as if they couldn’t update the apps themselves. The whole “review” feels more like an iPhone user trying to switch to Android for the first time, being confused because it’s different, and complaining about it because they don’t understand it.

The main benefits of CalyxOS lie under the hood. It’s built to be more secure out of the box, and doesn’t connect everywhere without consent like most other Android ROMs. If you’re fine with the privacy and security of using something like LineageOS, CalyxOS doesn’t have much extra to offer.

The antivirus: Used to be good, decent free (in price) tool if you’re in a situation where you need one. Otherwise, Windows Defender is good enough for your needs. (And just don’t install goofy ahh apps on Android, you also don’t need one there).

The VPN: Same as any other VPN company. Chances are you don’t need one, and all of them are based fully on trust. “Least bad” VPN award goes to Mullvad.

NordVPN (and their entire service stack) is not trustworthy at all.

The extra y just forces a database update. The mechanism to detect when not to update the database is a simple timestamp compare, and shouldn’t break. archlinux-keyring might need a “manual” update if an Arch Linux system is left without updates for a longer period of time. That’s the only situation doing pacman -Sy, then pacman -S archlinux-keyring is recommended, and it needs to be followed with pacman -Syu to avoid a partial upgrade.

https://ntfy.sh/

Easily set up, and easily attached to other things. Simple notifications about whatever is needed, like service health or updates, new posts on public platforms, etc. A simple curl is plenty to send and receive notifications, and it works on Android without requiring FCM (Google infrastructure).

I use mautrix/discord, it can work in both puppeting (sign into your account) mode and relay (bot account with webhooks) mode.

1. A puppeting (personal account) Discord bridge basically requires your own homeserver. You are trusting the homeserver owner / bridge host fully with your Discord account.
2. It is technically against Discord ToS. While I don’t think anyone’s been banned yet, several people have started receiving warnings that they “spammed”, most of them after sending an attachment. These warnings are on your account for 2 years, and could contribute to an account ban.
3. Voice chat is not, and probably will not be supported.
4. Do NOT bridge a “large” server. You are essentially re-hosting the chats, which can be extremely taxing for large and active Discord servers.

I use mine for a single channel in a “medium-size” server (~2k people), a friend group server, DMs, and a few channels that follow a bunch of announcement channels on other servers.

““compromised device”” in this scenario is any device with a chat app installed, push notifications on, and the chat service uses Cloudflare CDN. This is a very common setup, Discord and Signal were mentioned as examples. Many others are vulnerable for the same thing. With read receipts on the chat platform (like Signal), no push notifications are required.

The headline is sensationalist, but it isn’t something to be ignored. Especially for more privacy focused platforms like Signal, even leaking the country someone is in can be considered a risk. That’s effectively what this attack allows.

If you notice things are missing, feel free to contribute to OpenStreetMap. For example, by using StreetComplete. If you add the map details that are missing, it makes the map more useful for everyone.

virt-manager only requires access to the libvirtd socket, as long as the flatpak.has that as default configuration (which I imagine would be the case), there’s zero difference beteween flatpak and native.

Sorry, posted that on mobile without checking that it’s not the mobile link.

There’s a legal precedent that cookie stuffing is considered wire fraud

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Straight lines don’t have artifacts (car door, walkie talkies). Text, including off-axis text, is perfectly fine (“POLIZEI” on the right guy’s uniform). The compression around the hair looks normal. Last time I checked, Even “generative” AI couldn’t get those things right.

There’s several online sources that compile some of the reasons why Manjaro is objectively a bad distro, here’s one as an example: https://manjarno.pages.dev/

You’re free to choose whatever you want on your system, I just reccomend against Manjaro (and Ubuntu).

In the past, I would’ve agreed. These days, hardware compatibility for anything except the very latest is pretty much the same among distros.