You should be in a good place with a laptop with integrated intel/amd graphics, and an Intel wifi card. Graphics and wifi are the most common pain points when it comes to linux so you can narrow down and research from there. I’ve had good luck with Dell and Lenovo. Currently have a Lenovo yoga with touchscreen and everything except fingerprint scanner works out of the box.
There are some linux friendly OEMs too like framework, tuxedo, and ststem76 that are worth taking a look.
DNS filering alone doesn’t work for YouTube in my experience.
Yes
I learned early on you can’t rely on them for factual information for reasons you stated.
I use them for creative writing tasks (drafting up emails, letters, etc), generating ideas, for creating excel formulas, basic python, vba functions, etc.
I assume you’re talking about the one found in samsung phones. It’s basically like a launcher with shortcuts to apps you can access from any screen without having to go back to home or the app tray. Personally I found it to be too much also, not very customizable and inefficient use of space with only a few apps showing up there. It can be disabled in settings.
I like the idea though. I use the one handed+ module in goodlock where I can set another more compact app launcher when I diagonally swipe down from anywhere along the right edge screen. I have other shortcuts set to other gestures. It’s handy for multitasking.
I started my Linux journey with Ubuntu, then switched to Linux Mint for a while and dabbled with Manjaro for a hot minute, and ultimately found my home on Fedora Workstation for the past several years. Once set up with rpmfusion and 3rd party codecs it’s a very solid and reliable distribution. The new atomic projects (and derivatives) look very interesting too.