I have just heard it mentioned in regards to both the steam deck and smartphones with high refresh rates. I don't know by how much the battery is affected but I know that lower refresh rate draws less. That why smartphones have variable refresh rate and lower their refresh rate to like 1hz when nothing is happening on screen. You can Google it if you want more info
50hz draws less battery so my guess is that they assume players who cap their frame rate at 25 are more in need of battery life over low latency, because why else would you cap it that low?
Damn that's not the easiest problem. I dont have any solutions unfortunately but have you tested any distros with graphical installers? I'm curious if any of them solve this or if they behave the same as windows.
Any OS is resistant if you disable the usb ports but other than that there is not much you can do. Just dont plug in random cables or usb sticks into your computer
Back when I had a surface pro I used GNOME with a plugin that gave a floating dock that could be shown by pressing a semi-transparent button. That made it a lot easier to use without a keyboard. For applications I mostly used the default GNOME ones. They are often pretty easy to navigate with just a touchscreen.
Also, if you want to use the stylus to take notes or edit pdfs I recommend Xournal++. Krita is of course also great for drawing and has great stylus support.
My favorite part is where he admits to being mad without even knowing what Wayland is.
Edit: When I wrote the above, I didn't really realize what Wayland even was, I just noticed that some distributions (like Fedora) started pushing it onto me and things didn't work properly there.
The oled deck does support hdr, dont know why some people are claiming ut doesn't.
General HDR is not supported in Linux yet though, only in games. So videos are unfortunately not a thing I can use for comparison.