On one hand I agree that most people probably won't change. On the other, the difference between an OS and websites is that windows has very little exclusivity left. If you want to read Facebook content, you go on Facebook. If you want to watch fallout, you go on prime. If you want to watch long-form content (relative to TikTok), you go to youtube.
If you want a good OS, you're not forced by Microsoft to exclusively use windows. There are some pockets (like Xbox game pass games) but overall the average user could realistically switch to debian, Ubuntu or mint and not actually materially change what they do and watch on their computer, whereas if you decided to stop using Netflix, yes the experience of watching would be better but you wouldn't actually be experiencing the same content.
If you like this then I'd recommend reading more papers published at sigbovik. Favorites include "do programming socks make you better at programing?", "making hard drives by increasingly stupid and unworkable means" and "a formal mathematical proof that I am transgender"
Imo immutable distros are what's paving the future. Personally I'm a debian fangirl, but if you want to learn something new then I'd take a look towards these, otherwise you're essentially just configuring all the things the same ways as before, which is fine but I think we're moving away from this.
Your laptop will be fine, although it has a Nvidia graphics card so that's always a dice roll. You probably will have problems with brightness control and sleep mode.
For your privacy goal, honestly just using a properly configured firefox on any Linux is fine. You're already using linux, and for the rest your browser really shouldn't leak that much info, so it's up to the normal avenues of blocking trackers etc.
Nope. Just commenting to let you know that on Linux, you should check the 2Gb of ram box because the installer behaves in a way that can make it crash on Linux if you don't and well, clicking the box is a simple fix.
I update my packages every day on debian. I have yet to have something break. The only issue I ever had was steam got uninstalled when dist-upgrading from debian 11 to 12. Promptly reinstalled, of course all my games were still on disk.
EAC is now largely compatible with Linux, but devs have to enable support per game.
I recommend browsing protondb to see how (if) people have made games with anticheat work, you might need to change proton versions, add launch options etc.
I doesn't have auto hotkey because for the most part, you can control Linux from the command-line without someone having to invent a new scripting language from scratch to control it.
I heavily recommend you familiarize yourself with bash and the system commands you'll need to send key presses, move windows, spawn and kill programs, etc.
On fedora and el, nvtop apparently is installed as an appimage. An appimage is just a single executable, that you may delete. You may also delete the .desktop entry from /usr/share.
Also: this city has only one road. How is traffic going to be? Better hope you somehow get a flat near your work, and that everyone else does too, and that nobody ever moves or cha'mnges job for any reason. This is such a horsehit project I'm surprised the guy who proposed it didn't get thrown out of the window like in the meme.
Also keep in mind that a country that doesn't have such a treaty is largely free to extradite someone to the US anyway, as a one-off. So really the list is even shorter.
Crack the games. Yet another instance of pirates having a better experience than costumers.