Link to r/VPNTorrents' recommendations.

TL;DR: Only AirVPN and ProtonVPN are recommended. While, IVPN and Mullvad used to be until they discontinued port-forwarding; which makes them unviable for torrenting.

Link that provides Privacy Guides' opinion on AirVPN. It's basically rejected because there have been no audits.

I disagree with most of the benefits you list

I'm curious to hear your objections.

chief among them “increased security”

Do you deny that specific protection to some attacks is provided through the chosen model of 'immutability' on at least one of the atomic distros?

not to mention half of them are already supported by traditional package managers

Hmm...,:

• atomicity; nope
• reproducibility =/= reproducible builds for some packages (if that's what you meant)
• declarative system configuration; ansible (and any other solution that I've witnessed being mentioned in such discussions) succeed (at best) at convergent system management, while e.g. NixOS does congruent system management by default. Consider taking a look at this page if you're interested in what these are and how they're different. (Spoiler alert) congruent is better and therefore more desirable.
• increased security; security is not limited to chosen model for 'immutability' if at all; as Qubes OS (read: most secure and private desktop OS) doesn't rely on it for its security. So I can understand where you're coming from, but I have yet to see any non-security focused distro that provides the elevated protection against particular attacks that some atomic distros offer by default.
• built-in rollback functionality; sure, this is not exclusive to atomic distros. Perhaps I should have done a better job at making clear that it isn't a feature provided necessarily by atomicity. But, the fact that I listed it at the very end, alludes that it isn't as exclusive and consequential as atomicity is. At this point, however, it has become almost synonymous with atomic distros, while the same can't be said about traditional distros.
• regarding the consequences; I'm unaware of any distro that does those out of the box (barring Pop!_OS with their factory reset). Though, I'd love to be educated on this.

I was genuinely curious so thanks for the rationale.

It has been my pleasure ☺️! I'm also genuinely curious to read your reply to this comment😉.

One important thing you need to know about distros: they’re all the same under the hood.

This is true for the traditional model in which the package manager is the main differentiator between distros. Therefore Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE etc and their derivatives (which make up about 90% of the distros found on DistroWatch) are indeed mostly the same.

But the likes of Gentoo and NixOS etc don't quite fit the bill. Granted, a new user should only very rarely (if ever) start their Linux journeys on any of these advanced distros.

Thanks everyone for your replies, I’m really interested in KDE Plasma now.

I agree that KDE Plasma should satiate your desire for customizing the look and feel of your system. But, note that KDE Plasma isn't properly supported on Linux Mint. Therefore, consider switching to a Distro in which it is; e.g. the KDE Flavors/Spins of Fedora, openSUSE or Ubuntu.

Fedora is and will always be ~~cutting~~ leading edge.

Fixed that for you ;) .

It's often used to describe a distro in which (at least some) parts of the system are read-only on runtime. Furthermore, features like atomicity (i.e. an upgrade either happens or doesn't; no in-between state), reproducibility^[1]^ and improved security against certain types of attacks are its associated benefits that can (mostly) only exist due to said 'immutability'. This allows higher degree of stability and (finally) rollback-functionality, which are functionalities that are often associated with 'immutability' but aren't inherently/necessarily tied to it; as other means to gain these do exist.

The reason why I've been careful with the term "immutable" (which literally is a fancy word for "unchanging"), is because the term doesn't quite apply to what the distros offer (most of these aren't actually unchanging in absolute sense) and because people tend to import associations that come from other ecosystems that have their own rules regarding immutability (like Android, SteamOS etc). A more fitting term would be atomic (which has been used to some degree by distros in the past). The name actually applies to all distros that are currently referred to as 'immutable', it's descriptive and is the actual differentiator between these and the so-called 'mutable' distros. Further differentiation can be had with descriptions like declarative, image-based, reproducible etc.

1. That is, two machines that have the exact same software installed should be identical even if one has been installed a few years ago, while the other has been freshly installed (besides content of home folder etc). So stuff like cruft, bitrot and (to a lesser degree) state are absent on so-called 'immutable' distros.

Welcome on board!

You revealed in your previous post to be a gamer. Therefore, I'd like to focus on software that might help with that (in alpabetical order):

• Bazzite-Arch
• Bottles
• Conty
• Lutris^[1]^

For a one-stop-solution for all your problems related to package X not being available in the repos of distro Y; consider the more than excellent Distrobox.

1. You should probably start with this one as the others might be less intuitive to you at the moment. Furthermore, their use-cases and thus why one might prefer the others over Lutris in the first place might not be clear currently and not even be stuff you worry about in the first place.

we use discord

Fortunately, Discord has (very recently) started to officially support Linux as a flatpak.

I did debian with cinnamon and ran into some issues

This might be important; perhaps consider telling us about the issues you ran into.

I am an absolute beginner to linux

Honestly, you should be fine regardless. But it's undeniable that -due to Linux Mint's popularity amongst new users- you'll likely have an easier time finding solutions to problems you might encounter.

and i’m a g*mer (laugh it up)

Once again, either one of these should be able to suit your needs. You might have to relearn how you access your games, but that's true regardless of whichever distro you end up choosing.

Thanks for the correction!

Nix is definitely cool and I already have it installed on my system. Unfortunately, even Nix has trouble with keeping Brave up-to-date at all times. It's still on 1.59.120, while Brave has had three releases since. It took about 3 days after the release of version 1.59.120 for them to release it on their repos. As you can see, it leaves a lot to desire.

Brave homophobic though

Its CEO; yes.

It is the best Chromium based browser, in a sense, unfortunately…

Agreed.