And put a cover on those TPS reports!

Yes, but maybe it's not so bad. It creates a clear separation between work and play. Windows is for boring work and office stuff. Linux is the happy place at home.

I did use Ubuntu MATE for a while. Quite happy with it but finally couldn't resist the ckall of KDE

A graphical 'advanced' package manager for Qt / KDE. Something to replace Muon which is/was the KDE equivalent of Synaptic but no longer available in Kubuntu. Discover shows you apps (both snap and apt), Muon showed packages with all sort of relevant technical information (source, dependencies, 'reverse dependencies', installed files). I guess everything Synaptic/Muon does is also available through the various apt subcommands but there is value in a decent GUI to bundle those individual commands and their output.

The option is there, the news is that GNOME changed the default value.

Really like the pragmatic approach of the update scripts in the background for this type of intended user. NixOS is something I have been reading about now for years but never tried myself. Looking at the repo and seeing the config makes me think that I might actually understand how it works ... a bit.

From time to time I have to be reminded that this exists.

It can be re-enabled with the following command (source is the Merge Request linked in the article):

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true

Can imagine some distros will override the GNOME default here.

Are you sure about nomodeset still nerfing the GPU once in a desktop session? I remember having to use nomodeset on my own PC to get text displayed at boot. However once booted and inside the graphical desktop Ubuntu would use the proprietary NVIDIA driver just fine. That was a few years back though (around 2010)