(rightfully) does not like mixed language codebases for projects as large and important as Linux

You make it sound like it’s a matter of taste rather than a technical one (and I suspect it actually might be just about taste in the end)

I stopped at “secret” (yes, the occurrence in the title) :)

TBH the checksums are pretty useless for humans who download an .iso and install it… they are mainly for mirrors and similar that download files without using them

He never said he wants free speech for everyone :) TBH the shame should be on those who believed that Musk could somehow be the first right-wing extremist in history that wished the people at large had more rights and more freedoms.

Circle jerking, I guess? Same reason I use lemmy :)

Yank is Copy, you heathen!
Only in inferior software it is Paste.

(for the uninitiated: it’s Copy in vim and Paste in emacs; also if it wasn’t clear, I’m just joking)

1. By and large, distros package the same software so which one you pick is a matter of taste. As a beginner, you won’t have the knowledge to take advantage of documentation/instructions that are not written for your specific distro, so pick one of the more popular ones.

2. No, distro owners won’t be a problem in the same way that Microsoft or Apple are. Don’t worry about that: the moment they do something unsavory (even remotely) their projects will be forked, and switching to a different distro is not that big of a deal anyway.

3. If you like to tinker you will break your system, not because linux is fragile (it is not) but because knowledge of low-level stuff is widespread and the temptation to thinker with it is too great. I recommend you look into system snapshots and how they integrate with boot options (eg. opensuse tumbleweed automatically snapshosts your system when you update it and during boot you can choose to boot into a previous state - surely other distros do the same and, if yours doesn’t, you can set it up yourself).

4. The short answer is “use KDE” :)

5. KDE is great and seems to suit you. The DE you choose matters (IMHO) more that the distro, because once you are familiar with a DE and its shortcuts it’s a pain to switch, and also because once you are used to some feature it’s enormously frustrating to switch to a DE that doesn’t have it :)

From what I hear (I switched to AMD years ago), it’s not hard to make the Nvidia cards work properly, but it’s a recurring hassle and there are lots of things that are more fun to thinker with. Unless specific reasons you need an Nvidia card, I’d suggest selling it off and replacing it with a second-hand AMD/Intel one.

I’m sorry if this sounds rude, especially after not reading what must have taken you a long time to write…

Have you tried writing “distro that looks like macos” into a search engine?

The ones I added recently are all git-related (one key for signing and I started using different keys for codeberg, gitlab and github)

I did add a bunch of new keys to my ssh agent… this might really be it!