Didn't even notice them until they were pointed out in another thread a few days ago, honestly they seem, at worst, harmless. I disagree with them ideologically in a lot of ways, but I don't really think they're actively harmful. It's not as though they're posting hate speech or anything like that.
Damn, I have one of these that I use a lot for work, it's been pretty reliable so far, but this makes me think I should get something else to replace it...
Maybe I'm just living under a rock but I hadn't even heard of, let alone seen, Hexbear prior to this post and had to do a search to see what you were talking about. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
"Surely all the people who share subscriptions because they can't all afford 25 streaming services will each get their own accounts if we block password sharing, as opposed to just not using our services any more!"
The biggest advice I can give is to start with something like, as has been mentioned, Linux Mint, but also, don't buy into the idea that you eventually need to move to a more "advanced" distro. If Mint, or wherever you wind up, works for you, and you have no compelling reason to switch, then don't. All Linux is Linux, so to speak, the only things that distinguish distros are packages/package managers, default settings/configurations, and pre-installed programs. There's nothing preventing you from eventually becoming a power-user on a "noob-friendly" distro, if that's something you desire in the first place.
Do...do people really think Microsoft is stupid enough to kill off non-cloud based Windows? There are a lot of Windows users who, for either performance reasons, lack of reliable internet, etc. who would never get good use out of a cloud version. Microsoft is more than aware of this and there is no way in hell they'd shoot themselves in the foot like this.
What people are referring to in that regard is how, in 2011, Brendan Eich (who later founded Brave Software) stepped down as CEO of Mozilla, 11 days after his appointment to said position, after it came out he had donated $1000 dollars to the campaign for California Proposition 8 in 2008, a proposed state constitutional amendment seeking to ban same-sex marriage. Prop 8 wound up passing, although it was overturned a few years after the fact in court.
Here's an article from when Eich stepped down about the whole ordeal.
In Plasma 5, the icons shown in various parts of Plasma widgets (but not apps) can come from one of two places: the active icon theme, or the active Plasma style. How do you the user know which icons come from which place? You can’t, not easily. What can you do if you apply a Plasma style and it includes weird icons that make your Plasma widgets look visually inconsistent with the rest of your system–but only partially? Nothing!
[...]
For Plasma 6, we’re removing this questionable feature, and icons in Plasma widgets will always come from the systemwide icon theme. Much simpler, much more user-comprehensible, much better visual results 99% of the time.
I've tried to give Plasma a fair shot a few times, but, among other issues, I'm not a fan of Breeze and I found the theming functionality overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Mainly I could never figure out which themes certain elements were attached to. This is a big example and I'm glad to see them changing it.
I think some people also just haven't used Firefox in a while, and it's gotten better since the last time they used it. I've never had issues on Firefox, however I only became a Firefox user a few years ago. Meanwhile my girlfriend insists it's buggy and slow, but she hasn't used it in many years.
Unfortunately if you can't afford to take time to learn new programs you're most likely going to have to dual boot. As someone who also does creative work, and had been pretty dependent on Adobe prior to moving to Linux, I can tell you that trying to run any of the Adobe programs on Linux is a fool's errand. Photoshop kind of works in Wine, but the rest are just plain unusable.
There's also winapps, which essentially uses a VM to run Windows programs while integrating them into your regular Desktop in a seamless manner. I've never tried it and it hasn't been updated in 2 years, but you could give it a shot.
If you do decide to try out alternatives though, DaVinci Resolve is good for video editing, Photopea (which is a web app) is pretty goddamn similar to Photoshop, Inkscape is pretty good for vector graphics, and Ardour, Audacity, and Reaper are all good in different ways for audio work.
I've actually had a pretty good experience with my NVIDIA card on GNOME Wayland, but KDE was unusable.