These are the mixes of the Federation DJ Enterprise. His five-hour mission: to spin strange new records, to seek out new sounds and new labels, to boldly crate-dig where no DJ has dug before. (disco Alexander Courage theme plays)

You can install an antivirus, but you really don't need to. Malware for Linux is rare, and malware that targets desktop Linux users is extremely rare (to the point that it's a newsworthy story every time it does appear). Most distros have ClamAV and the frontend ClamTk in their repos, but it's primarily used to scan servers for Windows malware before it reaches its intended target. Some Windows malware can still be harmful if run with Wine/Proton, but unless you're downloading and running a lot of Windows software from unofficial sources (which you shouldn't have any reason to) that won't be a risk.

Debian! It's stable, elegant, and doesn't impede customization. I distro-hopped a lot over the years - some that I ended up disliking included KaOS (severely limited software repository), Clear Linux (only way to get ffmpeg was to compile it from source) and Fedora (very slow); most I liked, and just decided to move on at some point. But I kept coming back to Debian, and eventually got to a point where instead of trying a different distro when Debian broke, I would just reinstall Debian.

I'd be interested to try VanillaOS or another "immutable" distro at some point in the future. See if they've matured enough for my day-to-day use.

Have you tried using different runners? According to ProtonDB Ape Out is completely supported by Proton, so maybe try a Proton runner instead of Wine.

Glad we have a release date now. Although, I hope they go for weekly releases, because I don't want to feel obligated to binge watch it.

Elisa is just the latest (and most actively developed) addition to the long list of music players developed under the KDE umbrella.

I have to borrow a school laptop just to do proctored exams, because their "lockdown browser" doesn't support Linux, and even if it did, it seems to do some things in kernel mode, so I don't want it on my system.

Surprisingly, most classes at my university are entirely FOSS based, aside from that one piece of software, an obscure scientific program that only one assignment used, and MATLAB (which is easily replaced by GNU Octave.)

I can't object to more Jett Reno!

Wasn't screenfetch the thing neofetch was supposed to replace? Apparently it has more recent development activity (5 months ago), anyway...

It still sounds to me like something's up with the disk. Can't think of any solutions to suggest but I would run a SMART health check on it:

sudo apt install smartmontools  
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

If you prefer a graphical tool, you can do the same thing with GNOME Disks, which also has options for disk benchmarking.

In the resulting report, the overall health state should be "PASSED", the "Type" column should show "Pre-fail" and "Old age" values, and the "Media-Wearout-Indicator" should be close to 100. If the overall health state is "FAILED", then you will want to back up your files immediately and consider getting a new SSD.

What makes this extra confusing to me, is that this doesn't seem to happen to the same extent for Invidious instances. I've only needed to swap between two instances on Clipious, whereas on LibreTube I was hopping across their entire instance list and sometimes not finding even one working instance.

I don't think "one unified distro", or even an "official distro", is possible without taking critical parts of Linux private and closed-source. As long as the freedom exists people will make their own "versions" of (GNU/)Linux.