I dunno, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and using mostly flatpacks for my apps have been pretty consistent for me lately, though that's the first rolling release distro I've tried.

I had about 16TB of total storage when it was using that much RAM. It still didn't like it.

Can confirm; this is exactly why I switched to Linux. After my fifth-ish reinstallation of Windows, Microsoft pushed an update that caused the OS to use 80-90% of my CPU and I couldn't fix it because they locked down the service that was doing it despite it being entirely unrelated to my use of the computer (it was an Edge-related service that scanned web traffic for "optimization" if I remember right - one of those where Microsoft says "it's necessary but we won't tell you what it is and it wasn't in the OS before a couple months ago").

Windows often uses 8GB at idle for me with a single browser window open due to how much background BS it runs that is entirely irrelevant to anything I use the PC for. I upgraded to 32GB, then just finally decided to switch to Linux for good because it uses around 4-5GB with 10+ programs open (and most of that is Steam and Discord being inefficient).

Vulkan is basically unsupported by nVidia on anything before the 20-series on Linux. My 1060 6GB can only manage around 4-5 FPS at 1080p in some games as a result while others work totally fine. In addition, the drivers aren't open source, so no one can go in and fix that problem.

It's the cost of federation with instances that try to be giant general-purpose instances (.world and .ee, mostly): just constant shitty takes that overwhelm participants in the conversation. Federation works far better with lots of small purpose-driven instances instead of gigantic ones; my small (<1000 users) specific community-focused Mastodon instance sees absolutely nothing like this and is full of people who intentionally engage in good-faith conversation with the rest of the community while every large instance I've seen has the same issues as centralized social media in that regard.

Is there another alternative? Bandcamp is the only similar website that a lot of artists I enjoy use.