I'd say they all offer different types of customization. It's less a matter of how much you can do, and more a matter of what you want to do and how much time you're willing to spend working on it. KDE is for people who want to customize their desktop, and want it to be easy to do so. GNOME is for people who just want something that works, but it still offers a lot of customization, it's just not as well-supported (their philosophy is "if theming breaks an app, it's not our fault").

KDE doesn't support full CSS customization on its own, but there are theming engines like Kvantum and QtCurve that address the limitations that arise from this. I'd say it's on almost equal footing with GNOME in that regard, since both GTK4+libadwaita and Qt6+KF6 are designed for color scheme customization, but require various workarounds and obscure settings for anything more than that. If anything the workarounds are easier in KDE.

Similarly, KDE supports layout customization through widgets and graphical menus. GNOME also supports layout customization, but through extensions instead.

And then you can do all of the above and more if you use a window manager, or an LXDE/LXQt-style desktop that lets you disable or replace all its components in settings - just mix and match components like panels, file managers, display managers, polkit agents, etc. You can basically build your own DE that way, and it doesn't get much more customizable than that. But maybe you don't want to spend your time choosing every component of your custom DE. That's what something like KDE is for.

"Move Along Home" would work so much better as a Doctor Who episode. Has a kind of absurdity that is perfect for Who, but stands out in a bad way in Trek.

Unlikely. While in theory someone could create a compatibility layer, it would be quite a challenge, as obviously, kernel modules are very closely tied to the specific kernel. I did some web searches, and only found the same few dead projects (that didn't completely solve this issue anyway) that you found, and other forum posts that offer little encouragement.

Make sure you have the latest version of Windows 10 or 11, and the latest drivers for your network hardware. If you do, then there's probably not much you can do about this.

I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a mix between Starfleet and Vau N'Akat dress.

Remember Me was one of the episodes that got me into Star Trek. My parents loved TNG and Voyager, but it was one of the first episodes I actually sat down and watched with them, and the whole premise of everyone disappearing, and how Beverly figured out what was going on, hit my brain in just the right way.

I'm working on possibly outdated second-hand information, so maybe it isn't happening anymore. I haven't been dual booting since ~2018 and even then I basically never used Windows.

I haven't had much experience with Kubuntu, but I do know it has more preinstalled apps, slightly older versions of those apps (where KDE Neon has the latest version of every KDE app the day it releases), but slightly newer non-KDE apps in the non-LTS releases, and is more beholden to Canonical's decisions, such as advertising Ubuntu Pro during upgrades or forcibly installing some programs as snaps. Kubuntu might hold your hand a bit more under certain circumstances, while KDE Neon keeps things simpler, but the difference in ease of use is not that significant, especially if you have any experience with Linux in the last ten years or so.

Lighter, I think. About on par with LXQt or Trinity (KDE 3).

In that case makepkg isn't compiling anything, it's just packaging the existing binaries so that they can be more easily installed and recognized by your package manager.

And because of that, custom configurations are wonderfully easy to make, technical issues are rare, and the few issues you do experience are quite possible to solve. Which is why I settled on Debian.

If you really want to learn Linux, you can use any (actively maintained desktop) distro to learn just about everything. Beginner friendly just means the default software is enough to do everything a typical user wants to do, in a way that is likely to be intuitive even if they recently switched from Windows or OS X. Installing and configuring something like Arch or Gentoo can be a good way to learn more about how Linux works, and some distros like Debian or Arch are better as a starting point for customization than a beginner distro, due to having less pre-configured cruft to work around. But you aren't limited by using Mint, unless you choose to limit yourself.

I use https://vgy.me/ currently. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any open-source options, but vgy at least seems friendly and easy to work with.