I generally think the most important thing when you're not yet very experienced with Linux is to just pick a distro that is relatively popular, since these are usually very googleable.
My personal favorite is probably still Fedora. Pick Fedora Workstation Gnome if you want something that has the most online support and Fedora KDE if you want something with a similar workflow as Windows.
I also generally think that using a normal Linux Distro is a better choice if you don't want to do only gaming and nothing else, since Steam OS actually makes some things a lot more difficult (you cannot easily install many programs due to its immutable nature, it only has AMD GPU support, doesn't include even basic things like print functionality, the installation process is not the easiest, ...) These things will be pretty big hurdles to overcome for a newcomer. The only real thing that is probably easier on Steam OS is that Steam is already pre-installed, but considering that you can literally install Steam on Fedora without using the terminal probably less than 10 mouse clicks, I wouldn't consider this a very big advantage.
If you do end up going for a normal distro (like Fedora), I would btw highly recommend installing Steam not as a flatpak but as a "normal" application. This is not very difficult and will provide a much more stable experience than if you just use the Flatpak (which may be the first thing you come across in the software store). There are short tutorials available for: Fedora, Ubuntu, ...
I do sometimes wish that Valve would simply automatically choose the Proton version of a game to be installed if it's obviously superior (like with Rocket League). Also, why is Steam play not enabled for all titles by default? As far as I know, they're already doing some of that validation for the Steam Deck, might as well use it for Desktop users as well.
They certainly do, at least to an extent. In many fields where you have to work with a lot of data people will use R or Python to handle/transform/perform calculations.
True. HPC definitely plays a big role in the field, and essentially all compute clusters run some sort of Linux distro. Even though clients that can also be run locally then often have Windows binaries too, I'd say software support on Linux is at least as good as on Windows, probably a bit better.
I'm likely going to try out Wave Terminal with a self hosted LLM. I think it may well be quite useful, just don't want to upload my entire command history to OpenAI.
Highly depends on where you are in the world. I feel like PHEVs might make some sense in America, in Europe demand is shrinking every year since charging networks have gotten fairly good and BEVs offer more flexibility in terms of charging, especially if you can't charge at home.
I think not wanting to federate/bridge with Bluesky is a very bad idea. The entire idea is that we should get a Fediverse that is as connected as possible, not split up into many tiny subsets of users.
It wouldn't be trivial to package such a big app as a flatpak (or snap for that matter) and also maintain it properly, so as long as the original developers don't do the work I think it is unlikely to happen.
But for a tool that I'm going to be using a lot in the future I think it makes sense to invest the time once to install it, even if it's a bit more complicated.
As for DaVinci Resolve, installation can be a bit weird if you don't happen to run one of the officially supported Distros. Because of that, the easiest way to run it is probably via DistroBox, Michael Horn made a great tutorial about that: https://youtu.be/wmRiZQ9IZfc
If you want something that works very well and is quite convenient, I can recommend the Scaleway S3 Glacier storage. If you only need a few GBs, it will only cost a couple of cents per month.
If anything, I feel like Nextcloud Mail is the thing that's going to end up being killed, not Roundcube. Nextcloud doesn't exactly seem like a company that would buy a superior product just to kill it off.
I know, but at least we'd only have one physical connector at that point. While there are indeed a lot of standards for USB C, many of them are not all that relevant in day-to-day use when you're mostly just looking to connect some basic USB peripherals like a mouse, a thumb drive or charge your phone.
Sure, but the form factor of the Steam Deck will always limit performance and carry some extra cost with it. And for a large user base installing another OS on a PC (Holo ISO) is something they are not going to do. Hence, Steam Machine.
Funnily enough, recently I've been playing the FF6 Pixel Remaster on the Deck. It's still a very good game.