I have no idea what impact Valve has had, but SteamOS is indeed Arch Linux with Valve’s kernel, KDE Plasma desktop and a separate Gamescope session running a big picture mode like environment.

That’s the beauty of the fediverse, your preference doesn’t restrict others freedom. There are non-tech, non-Linux, non-political non-defaultSubreddit etc communities that currently only have a following on Reddit largely because the community is not “in the know” about Lemmy.

I still think it would be a better world if the majority of people used Lemmy instead of Reddit, Signal instead of Whatsapp, Mastodon instead of X etc, despite all the dipshittery that follows when the majority joins.

We can have those niche communities, but the problem is reaching out to the average user (who isn’t in to tech) to join.

If, for example, some non-tech podcast decided to have a Lemmy community instead of a subreddit, then there would be a proportion people who join for that. But I imagine the numbers would be very low considering most shows also have other socials so many people would join the discord server instead. Also in this hypothetical, nothing stops someone from creating an unofficial subreddit which would likely become the popular one.

I can’t remember exactly. There are two app stores and Discover is one of them. If I was you I would boot into a live or virtual environment and check it out. I think it’s explained in the welcome screen.

Sorry I can’t remember.

Correct. Just use Signal. Problem solved.

Discover in Kubuntu works a little differently than you would expect if you used KDE elsewhere.

You are right, the app management philosophy for Kubuntu is not quite right. Canonical put their effort towards providing Ubuntu with Gnome.

I had very similar issues, and since I wanted KDE (so many machines in my house already using KDE and I’m starting to get really comfortable with it) and I needed to use a specific app without containerization and the developer only makes a deb and rpm, I ended up trying Fedora with KDE. The DE bundled there is quite unadulterated, it’s basically a near latest stock KDE desktop. It was very seemless, you almost need to know nothing specific about Fedora, just use you muscle memory navigating the desktop.