Ulu-Mulu-no-die

First thing to consider is they all use the same Desktop Environments.

Unlike Windows, in Linux the “graphic” is completely separated from the operating system, any DE can be uses on any distro, so trying different distros that come with the same DE, might make you think there’s very little difference (at first look).

Second, almost all distros are derivatives, that contributes to make them feel similar. The original ones are just a bunch: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, SuSe, Arch, Gentoo, everything else is based either on one of those or on another derivative, if your curious you can have a look at this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg.
So for example, if you take Ubuntu and Mint, they might look similar because Mint is based on Ubuntu.

If you want to see the real differences, you need to look at the original ones, the core differences are: the way software is packaged and managed, and the “philosophy” behind the way the system is overall administered, maintained and released.

Derivatives add differences to the user experience, they main reason they’re created is someone is not completely happy with the way a distro does things and they create one the meets their needs, for example, Debian is improved dramatically on the user experience lately, but many years ago was quite arduous to setup and use for non-experts, so Ubuntu was born.

Now to answer you question

as long as I choose one that gets regular updates, it doesn’t matter fundamentally?

It does matter, tho it’s not as much world-changing as some people seem to think (especially when it comes to gaming).

The most important things are support for your hardware and easy of administration/use. Most distros will recognize and setup your hardware out of the box, but some might require tinkering or extra steps. Some distros automate almost everything so the user doesn’t need to think about it, others require more knowledge and more manual intervention, you have a much finer control of your system this way at the expense of some user friendliness, it’s up to you to decide what you prefer.

Then it comes the Desktop Environment, different DEs do things differently, which one to choose is totally personal preference.

As for software, unless you go after some niche obscure distro, you shouldn’t have problems finding it in the distro repositories. For edge cases you can always use Flatpaks or AppImages.

I’ve been using it for a few years on my gaming desktop and I couldn’t be happier about it, it’s the distro that stopped my distro-hopping.

most mods dont work on linux

Mods work just fine, it’s mod managers that sometimes don’t work.

If mods don’t have manual setup instructions, I install them on Windows, copy back to Linux the mod config file and happily play on Linux.

Of all the titles you could choose …

The article is interesting in that it talks about pushing towards open versions of kernel modules, instead of legacy ones, and of much broader scope that the literal 2 lines you chose as title.

Why not keeping the original?

It’s not ready yet (preview state) but NexusMods is developing an app for managing all their mods: https://github.com/Nexus-Mods/NexusMods.App, for Linux they’re releasing both an appimage and a standard setup.

On one side, I’m one of those glad for people coming to Linux because Linux is truly fantastic and it can make your life easier on many things, I’m happy for them.

On the other side, I share your concerns, because everything that gets adopted by the masses is inevitably subject to enshittification, I would never want that to happen to Linux.

We should find a sweet middle-point tho I have no idea what that would be.

I surely hope they never will, no user program should ever be allowed to run at kernel level, that’s what malware does.

I personally avoid those kind of games, but those who won’t can dual-boot.

Not the one you’re asking but I’ve been dual-booting Windows and Linux on my gaming desktop for many years, every time a build a new PC, disabling “secure boot” AND “fast boot” in the BIOS is the very first thing I do and I never had problems (I play on Linux but I keep Windows for testing in case I want to report a bug).

Fast boot is even more troublesome, since it’s a Windows specific feature that allows it to not truly shutdown so it can startup faster later, but that can cause locks for other OS that won’t work correctly.

In theory, Linux should be able to support secure boot (not fast boot), but since that one too was made for Windows, there are cases in which it could cause problems, I will always disable it just to be on the safe side.

Do you really believe they don’t have backups? Especially since it seems selling content for AI training was their plan for quite a while?

Or that they didn’t make full backups a couple years ago before the protest, anticipating a lot of users would try to delete their comments?

I think the only way to truly delete anything from reddit would be living in EU and enforcing a GDPR request, but even in that case, I believe it would be very difficult to check they actually comply.