I generally agree. I thought hexbear was fine until I saw some of the spam/trolling you mentioned, and then the genocide denial... That got me to start blocking communities there.
With that said I think exploding heads is probably just as bad, if not worse since the mods aren't against the content posted there. I know you said you didn't want to defederate and I kind of understand why, but at least keeping a close eye on the users there would be appreciated.
I'm terms of software, most distro are going to be the same, especially debian-based ones (Ubuntu, mint, pop, etc.) I think Mint is a great choice - cinnamon is a good, familiar desktop environment for windows users, and unlike ubintu it has flatpak support so you get a lot of up to date apps through that. I'll admit I'm biased though, and manjaro is probably great as well - I'd even suggest plain Arch, the new installer makes things really easy if you're somewhat tech savvy.
Office 365 can be accessed online, or a foss office suite like Libreoffice or Onlyoffice can edit and save to Microsoft file formats. Comparability is usually pretty good unless you're doing something really weird.
Unfortunately visual studio is a no-go. VSCode and Jetbrains work though.
Teams will also work through the browser. I believe they also have a PWA now for chrome. My company actually uses teams all the time even though they dev team is mostly on Linux.
There are alternative launchers for games outside of steam. Heroic is one I personally use - it supports Epic and GOG. Just check protondb to see if the games you care about work. IDK about Uplay but if you look around you might find something.
I haven't used those so I don't think so. But it lets you add music from local networks, and you can add streams from a URL (even supports youtube links, which is a way to watch youtube without ads without pihole or a third party app).
I don't think so much that cities attract left-leaning individuals as much as the people who live there tend to be (or become) left leaning.
In rural communities you tend to get a lot of families who have lived in the area for a long time, and not much movement. So they tend to be more homogenous. Cities tend to attract lots of different people (and more tends to happen), so you're gonna be exposed to a lot more and it will be harder to stay isolated.
Another factor is the white flight that occured after ww2. Lots of cheap housing was put up outside cities, and lots of white families moved out to live in them (in some cases they didn't even let black people buy houses in these developments). So you get a lot of conservative, white people moving out in the suburbs, leaving a lot of minorities who tend to be more liberal.
Everyone knows about VLC but I don't think many people know it has a really good Android app! I use it as my primary music app and it's great. Even has android auto support and a surprisingly sleek interface.
I mean my takeaway would be that the us shouldn't slaughter and torture people, not that they should have slaughtered and tortored more people to curb opium production.
I actually had the opposite experience with Limbo/Inside. With Limbo I felt the puzzles seemed unfair - I died a lot to things I couldn't see. I quit the game not too far in and haven't picked it up again.
But I played Inside and absolutely loved it, it's one of my favorite games now. So idk maybe I should give Limbo a shot again.
Personally, a lot of the "content" in totk feels like busywork for me. With botw I didn't know that to expect so I was willing to explore. But now, I know there's only so many things I can find - a shrine or a korok seed. Totk just adds more of those tiny rewards (like bubblefrogs) and it just doesn't feel worth it. At best, you sometimes get an armor piece but I barely even used any of those. There was one interesting side quest I found on the great plateau and I kept wondering what I would find, and it was just a heart container.
If any of the exploration lead to something other than a marginal reward, I think I'd enjoy my time a lot more. Maybe it's just because I played outer wilds between the games, and find story to be a much more interesting thing to find than an item.
Finally I can replay Outer Wilds.