Bazzite, the thing freaking works. I can do whatever I want without it crapping itself. Gaming, working, whatever. It's the best experience I had with a PC ever. Windows, Mac OS, or any other distro. On my work laptop I daily drive Aurora, which doesn't have any gaming stuff baked in, and has more dev tools at my disposal out of the box.
Grab two USB drives, flash Aurora on USB 1, install it to USB 2. Now you have a persistent, portable OS. If the USB drives are USB 3.0, they won't be slow.
I will answer to your annoyances from my context:
I use Bazzite on my gaming rig and Aurora on my work laptop.
I only use Flatpaks for GUI apps and Homebrew for CLI apps, things are stored in their respective folders.
My chosen distros are atomic / immutable, only user files can be changed, the system is shielded from breakage. You just can't brick it unless you really want to.
Caps lock works the same as windows.
Desktop shortcuts rearranging, didn't happen to me / haven't noticed.
Firefox restoring session no matter what: I'll try that and get back to you.
Bazzite & Aurora are very polished.
Flatpaks are the best, for CLI apps I use homebrew.
Bazzite / Aurora have automatically generated rollback images.
Honestly, if you want something that works for you and not the other way around, I suggest you use an Universal Blue distro.
It's been a long time since I last saw some news about it. Any comments regarding security and privacy versus Matrix ? Also, last I saw it was a bit of a hassle to self-host, am I right to assume things improved in that area ?
Easier, yes. But that's not something you can just download and run is it ? It requires tinkering. Only an advanced user will go through that. Mainstream users will keep being unable play that way.
This benchmark is against Thorium / Mercury. Which is already way faster than regular Firefox. The total aggregated speed is considerable. https://thorium.rocks/mercury_performance
I have experience doing exactly that with Bazzite, Aurora and Bluefin. Booting from a USB, it works perfectly out of the box. If you want to switch between any of these distros, with one command you can rebase (switch) to another distro without losing any data. Except when you switch between different desktop environments (Bluefin is GNOME based). This is how I use Linux on my work laptop, on a daily basis. I settled on Aurora on an M2 caddy.
To install it to a USB drive, you'll need two USB drives, one to boot to the installer, the other one is the target for the installation.
If you are more security minded, there's also https://secureblue.dev/ but I haven't tried it to be able to recommend it though.
The home dir on all these distros has persistance enabled.
What signs ? It doesn't say in the article. It reads more like a butthurt apple user rant.