stress

If buying a graphics card is in your plans, but AMD. Nvidia does better cards, but AMD works with less bugs on Linux. I just switched and I’m quite happy with the results.

For distro, Mint is a safe bet.

Man, you will have some pain as any change will cause. But I think you will like it. Have a second USB to be safe.

Interesting, but seems difficult to enforce

The malicious code is not on the source itself, it’s on tests and other files. The building process hijacks the code and inserts the malicious content, while the code itself is clean, So the co-manteiner was able to keep it hidden in plain sight.

That sounds like a bad transition plan. For sure there’s some lessons to learn from that experience.

Valve created gamescope, that’s a microcompositor just for games. Other Wayland compositors may still break games.