I’m a newcomer to Linux (only about a year in), but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Mine wasn’t at all. Steam has done a lot of work to make this seamless so that more games can be played on the Steam Deck. Check the Proton DB to see what your gamea look like.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

I have very little experience with this, but probably. Linux users tend to be tinkerers.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

Same answer for both: There’s Wine, and a whole bunch of setup scripts that can get even stuff like Adobe Creative Suite working with it. Worst case scenario, there’s VirtualBox for the one or two apps you might need to run Windows for. But I find that the open source options, while they might have a learning curve, tend to be substantially better than either of those options.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

More or less, but you can pick and choose what updates you want to install and when. Most distros have a package manager that’ll let you update the kernel, the drivers, the middleware, the desktop environment, all your apps, and even the package manager itself on your schedule, from one interface. You can also just ignore it and never update anything, though I wouldn’t recommend that.

How does digital security work on Linux?

Very well. It’s much more locked-down by default, for one thing.

Is it more vulnerable due to being open source?

Quite the opposite. Open source projects are well known for being less vulnerable out of the box; Linux in particular is used by huge companies as a lightweight server OS, so it has a lot of highly-paid people committing security fixes back down to the open source project.

Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Antivirus is a bandaid on Windows, provided because the OS was written with certain naive assumptions that let attackers get access they shouldn’t have. On Linux, those assumptions were not made. No application can be installed without your root password, for instance; downloaded files can’t even be executed without specifically making them executable; and access to edit system files is restricted by a very robust permissions system.

All of that, plus Linux’s much lower market share, also means that no malware authors are really wasting their time trying to write Linux malware. The attack vector just isn’t worth the extra effort.

So no, there’s no integrated antivirus; but for most users in most situations, it’s not needed at all.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Your mileage may vary significantly, but anecdotally it seems like most architectures from AMD and Nvidia have good support.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

Maybe, but like with Windows, I assume you have to really go out of your way to do so.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

I’ve only used Ubuntu and Mint. Mint has so far been the easiest and most user-friendly of the two. It’s also regularly touted as the best for newcomers.

This ain’t it, Chief.

I have one that was proven false, and then later re-proven true: the existence of the brontosaurus.

When I was in elementary school, we were taught that they existed, they were big, etc. Then, at some point while I was in college, I discovered that actually what we thought was a brontosaur was a brachiosaur or an apatosaur. And then, when my kids went to school and learned about the brontosaur, I discovered that actually, they did exist!

There’s an old adage that says “doctors make the worst patients.”

I wonder if the same is true for game devs making the worst players.

“But what if the developers don’t think it’s important but I’m going to wish I had it? I’ll go ahead and check anyway.”

Borderlands 3 added an “auto-sell loot below [x] rarity” option, and it is amazing.

It’s ok. We’re all here for each other.

This, plus looking at a tiny little toe-sized piece of unexplored minimap on the opposite side of the world and thinking, “but what if there’s something important there?!”

You got lucky. Somebody snuck a wyrm into my codex that got all of my thralls mining for coin bits.

“Oh, dude, you gotta stop using TJ’s Action Rune of Changed Files. That runebook has a backdoor to one of the hells now. Didn’t you see the patch notes?”

“Thank you for playing Wing Commander”

This is the exact same instinct that drives us to run away from the obvious path first. “Clearly that’s where the final boss is. Let me just check what’s down this way first…”

“…oh no wait, there’s a point-of-no-return ledge here. Ok, so maybe that other way was actually where the secret was. I’ll go back…”

“…hmm, there’s another ledge on this side too. Let me just put in a save point and…ok, yeah, this one is the final boss. Let me reload and check the other path…”

“…ugh, it restarted me way back here? And respawned all the enemies when I reloaded? That’s frustrating…”

“…THEY BOTH. LED. TO THE SAME. EXACT. PLACE.”

Let’s just say this happens a lot in my house.

I need to get on that, I guess.

125% agreed. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.” I think there’s potentially an engineering solution–a fluid dynamics engineering solution–but definitely not an app.

Oh, absolutely. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.”

An app for a toilet is a stupid idea, full stop.

They can still have both. A foot pedal for those who want it, a standard handle for those who don’t or can’t. In fact, retrofitting existing handle-flush toilets to add foot pedals could make a lot of sense.

Yeah, not to mention, adding any sort of electronic components to the thing would be dicey at best. A lot of bathrooms don’t even have power outlets anywhere near the toilet.

I’d prefer some sort of pressure-activated valve or something, but this is an engineering challenge that’s beyond my meager skills.

I have a wifi-enabled garage door opener whose manufacturer discontinued the Google Home connection for so that you have to use their app and see their Amazon or Walmart ads. I also have a wifi-enabled alarm system whose manufacturer apparently doesn’t care about Matter integration or whatever. So leaving the house in my car requires the use of two different apps (three if I also need to turn off lights).

In actuality I just use the physical buttons. But there was a time that I had a beautiful dream of getting a smart lock and setting my house up to lock the doors, close the garage door, and arm the alarm when I pushed a button in the car–and, more importantly, undo all of those things in reverse when I got home.

Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.

Ask me how I know.

That said, this could almost certainly be better-solved in other ways. Maybe by preventing the tank from refilling if there’s still something in the u-bend (then you’d know it needed attention because there’d be no water in it)?