It's not a flaw. Ostree is a last resort, you should be using containerized software. Layering a package should only be done when strictly necessary and not as the regular way to manage packages. If you need an overtly customized system, you use Nix or universal blue to design your new system declaratively and create your custom image.

Then just install KDE in your Arch install. Or use endeavorOS with KDE, or any other Arch based OS with KDE. Don't be dismissive of other people's interests.

Settings live in user space. Software exist in containers like AppImage, Flatpak or Distrobox. If something need deep system integration, they can be layered on top of the system in the user layer. Immutable does NOT mean less control. Just exerting control over the system in a different, usually more systematic, automatic and deterministic way.

your base distro is immutable, then any extra changes go on an additional mutable layer

That is exactly how OsTree and other layering solutions work. Only Nix requires a whole distro rebuild.

There's KDE Neon already. The whole point of this distribution is the atomic immutable part.

They're desperate to get bought and cash out a golden parachute.

Maybe they'll fix the sddm custom theming? It's currently broken on all immutables and doesn't allow custom themes.

SC is a scam. Of course they're willing to break the law to keep the money they stole.

We are going to burn the planet to make a shitty chat bot.

I discretely agree. Maybe puppet or salt. There are alternatives to raw doggin a github repository.

You have two paths today. NixOS with home manager. Or some immutable and atomic, either premade like fedora atomics or by hand with something like ansible. But both guarantee a way to fix the dotfile headache.

Brain damage in general is my hypothesis. Repeated head trauma, toxic substances like drug abuse and heavy metals in general. Anything that damages brain tissue eventually disrupts the ability for rational thought in the mild end to disconnection with reality altogether in the most extreme cases of psychosis.

You've never shared your intimate personal life with anyone? Your fears and woes, and happiness and triumphs? One of the wonderful qualities of deep friendship is the ability to withstand long stretches of being apart and still shine as brigth as the last time you met. I have a couple of people right now who I haven't seen or talked to in years. But I have the utmost certainty that if I were to pick up the phone and write them "hey, can we talk?" I would get an almost immediate response, despite the timezones. And the conversation would flow as if we just talked yesterday. That, is friendship to me.

Well, there's much more to it than just installing steam. That's highly dismissive of the effort it takes, including kernel level optimizations and driver space configurations required to guarantee top performance. To suggest it is pointless is insulting to a lot of people and not constructive criticism, at all.

Bazzite is just Kinoite with gaming things out of the box. Which in turn is just Fedora with KDE Plasma but atomic and immutable. It doesn't get any more general purpose than that. Bazzite even preinstalls a lot of stuff that Fedora users have to add manually, like proprietary drivers. If you don't want a gaming centric OS, then there's also Aurora which is the workstation version. I guess my point is that, there's not an objectively best choice in Linux. Something we often tend to forget is that personal taste also plays a role. I personally used Mint for 5 years and supported the project monetarily. But my tastes changed and I think atomic and immutable is a good path for adoption, since it all works more or less the way people have come to expect smartphones to work. But, with the power and flexibility of x86-64 computing. It perfectly fits the management model of set it up once and forget about it. Specially since OP is specifically mentioning his interest on having a system focused on security. A system that is working just works, no doubts, buts or ifs, it always works and if anything happens that make it not work anymore, you just rollback to a working state immediately without fuzz, it is a pretty neat feature.

On Mint, you troubleshoot the wifi antenna following a guide once and then you're done. On Bazzite you probably just needed to click to change to X11 instead of plain Plasma, on the login screen. I would bet money that you have an Nvidia GPU. Sometimes Nvidia breaks the drivers support on Wayland. They intentionally neglect it in order to keep your kind of mentality around.

On Windows, MS is going to eventually fix the workarounds so you can't update your computer anymore.

How is having to apply workarounds to keep windows working on old machines any different from troubleshooting the occasional linux issue? It's a rethorical question, the difference is that the workaround on Windows is mandatory while the Linux troubleshoot is nowadays rare and usually related to edge cases.

Some of the workarounds in this article are far more involved and convoluted than what I've ever had to do in 15 years of linux. Some are even dangerous for system stability and security. My very recent install of bazzite in a new laptop has been a perfectly out of the box it just works experience. Not even having to open the terminal. 100% friendly GUI without compromising flexibility, power and customizability. Today, suggesting linux with a solid desktop environment like KDE plasma is just foolproof. The end user will be using exactly the same knowledge and habits of Windows, without the harassment machine that is MS now. The change is not learning a new OS, is just switching a few assumptions on how some advanced things work.

Depends on your risk model. Almost all VPNs have a linux client available, most installers can setup whole disk encryption, and they even support secureboot. There's also antivirus that detect malicious software that target all OSs.

Linux is also far more private and secure than Windows. If you felt safe torrenting on Windows you were misled.

Since you mention gaming and learning how to troubleshoot games on Linux. This conditions your questions to whether that laptop has an Nvidia graphics card or not. Nvidia has an awful support in linux which creates all sorts of problems and limitations.

Regardless, I would suggest to use bazzite, but be warned, this is an immutable distro. They're entirely different from traditional distros and relatively newer. So there's a bit less support history on the web. Nevertheless, they provide a strong secure and stable system that should make having rescue tools less critical and keep your system alive and healthy indefinitely. Bazzite also sets up everything for gaming automatically from install.

If this were done by MS or Apple, who lack any shred of respect left, sure. If it were a material change on how the code works, certainly it would be most concerning. But what happened was blown entirely out of proportion for who Bitwarden has been and how they've acted in the past. They are still ethically very solid. And it was an immaterial change in the build tools, that could very well have been neglectful or accidental.