Depends! Bazzite on ROG Ally X, Debian for servers, CachyOS for my desktop and laptop and Fedora for my sons PC

Fair play, you’ve done a proper deep dive there. I’ll hold my hands up—I’m a sysadmin, not a journalist. I use tools to help structure my thoughts because my natural writing style is about as readable as a kernel panic. As for the 'social media' bit, the share buttons are a default plugin I haven't stripped out yet, and Mastodon is the only place I actually hang out because it's federated. I'm just a guy in a home lab trying to share some tech stories; sorry if the 'robotic' prose put you off

That is a fair point. 'Sideloading' is definitely a corporate term designed to make basic ownership of our devices feel like a 'workaround' rather than a right. I used it here because it's the language Google is currently using to justify their crackdown, but you're absolutely right—it's just installing software. We shouldn't let them control the vocabulary of our digital freedom.