

To me, that sounds like it’ll create more issues than it’ll solve. Part of why it’s difficult to get rid of large journals is because people like the centralization. Even beyond the obvious pride aspect of getting into an exclusive journal, a big reason for having journals is that it is much easier to find relevant papers if they’re collected and catalogued into a small number of large repositories (ie, journals).
Federation intrinsically has lower discoverability, and it is difficult enough to find relevant papers that you want. And due to decentralization, it is more difficult to separate out the troll articles from the serious ones. That doesn’t matter if federation is used for a social media platform or if it is used for peer-to-peer communication, but it seems to run counter to the purpose of publishing scientific articles.
And that’s not counting the issues that you would have with the review process on a federated service
Switched over to Linux last year. I gave Windows 11 a fair chance and it was a horrible experience. Installed Linux instead and now I basically never use Windows.
The distro itself doesn’t particularly matter. Unless you’re picking a niche distro or one designed for experts, all of them will have a good level of polish. What does matter is the desktop environment, which is the look and feel of the OS.
Many distros offer various desktop environments, and it can be a good idea to take a look at different desktop environments and see which one you like. I personally enjoy KDE Plasma, since I feel like it resembles Windows 10 the most. A bunch of popular distros like Bazzite and Fedora offer KDE Plasma variants. Alternatively, many people also like Cinnamon, though I personally think it looks somewhat outdated. Cinnamon is primarily offered by Linux Mint.
With the right desktop environment, Linux isn’t actually particularly technical. There’s definitely been a push recently to try to make things more user friendly. From time to time, you might still have to open terminal to do more advanced things, but I find that you can generally get by.
However, the way you do things in Linux is pretty different than in Windows, and it definitely takes a bit of getting used to and building up a new set of muscle memory. You will get frustrated that something isn’t where you think it is. My advice is that you should dual boot and keep a copy of Windows, so that you can switch back to Windows when you just need to get stuff done.
As for gaming, basically everything just works out of the box. I don’t even bother to check for Linux compatibility. Make sure to enable compatibility in the Steam settings and you should be good to go. The only time when games don’t work is if a game uses an anticheat that specifically blocks Linux - if you plan to play online games, it might be worth checking if the anticheat that it uses allows Linux or not. I haven’t tried modding so I can’t comment too much about that