KDE + wayland on Tumbleweed gave me this experience.

Doesn't have a significant impact. Using Telegram (though third party OSS client called Forkgram) and Signal without Play services on pixel as well.

Use MS Edge

Use Chrome. Edge is a minority browser (has a market share of ~10 %). Using chrome though gives all your data to google ( so not recommended).

They are pretty much equal. See https://privacytests.org/

All very good points.

Second this. Tumbleweed is a great distro. Nearly everything you'll need can be found in default repos. Then there are several endorsed (semi) official add-on repos, and if that fails there's always OBS (opi is your friend for searching those).

Daily rsync to a local nas and weekly backups to offsite with pika-backup.

Introduction to algorithms or The Art of Computer Programming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism

If there's tracking it's not private.

This didn’t seem to occur in Windows, but I’m pretty sure the copy process was also slower so guessing it’s some sort of buffer or heat quirk that 'nix didn’t account for in the more generic driver

If the device says it's a generic storage device (to the system that is) but actually isn't (based on your description) then it's 100% devices fault and not a Linux fault.

They are the "patterns" others mentioned.