This isn't a new discovery, is it? People already know about this, it's been like this for years. This has always been one of Netanyahu's many criticisms, even at home.
I’ve never tried NixOS, but it looks really promising.
I usually use Fedora or OpenSUSE, which have good software availability (unfortunately not as good as the AUR). Fedora provides selinux by default, and has profiles for basically everything. SUSE uses AppArmor, but Arch doesn’t provide convenient configuration for either, and only supports x86_64 (which is why I switched away from it).
Not really, because of accent differences. The best you could do is account for all phonemes distinguished across standardized varieties, regardless of their phonetic realization. Of course, you couldn't possibly account for all of them (e.g. distinguishing the Australian /æ/ vs /æː/ would be troublesome for British and American speakers).
Different languages have different conventions. For example, the standardized variety of my language allows 11/(0)9/2001, 11/(0)9/01, 11.(0)9.2001, 11.(0)9.01, 2001-09-11, 2001/09/11, 2001.09.11 (personally I usually use 11/09 without the year and 2001-09-11 with the year).
People have different opinions on how packages should be managed. Of course, there are some package managers which are very similar to each other (DNF and zypper have the same backend), but they can also get really different (Nix/Guix and pacman are basically completely opposite in philosophy). It comes down to preference, and you can't force anything.
"They're pushing"? Who's "they"? As far as I could see, it's an unchecked option.
In any case, what's the historical reason for mouse wheels actually working like they do?
Use whatever you want. But do consider if you want to contribute to Google's monopoly, and if you want to use an open-source browser.
Vivaldi Browser is not open source. Better use Brave than that…
If you still really hate Firefox, Ungoogled Chromium which is basically Chrome with all the Google stuff removed.
All of the above do still contribute to Google's monopoly, so I would really encourage Firefox or a fork.
Barring that, you could also get away with a WebKit browser (like GNOME web, Nyxt). Although WebKit is developed by Apple, it's still open source and doesn't look particularly bad. If you're on a Mac, Safari is an option, but it's closed source.
Stick to one of the major distros, not some little-known derivative. Also, please avoid Manjaro, it's horribly broken, and Ubuntu, because snap. It essentially just comes down to how you want to manage your packages.
Edit: VirtualBox is fully supported on Linux, but QEMU/KVM is better.
Have you read Discworld?