I run Gentoo as my main distro, and have for a couple years now. It’s a pretty stable rolling release (IMO more stable than Arch), and since you’re already an advanced user, the experience should be pretty rewarding!
The wiki is great, and the installation handbook is top notch.
You get to control exactly what features each package is compiled with, so no bloat at all.
KDE 6 just landed too!
Linux is whatever the Linux Mark Institute says it is.
You don’t need reproducible builds. You can get by if you trust whoever compiled it, like your distro’s maintainers or the pidgin developers.
Copyleft means: “if you modify the program and share it, you also have to include the source code for your modifications.”
The owner of the copyright (usually the developers or their employer) can still change the license later.
Eh, it’s also much easier to slap a client-side detector on because you can use generic detection methods. When you’re doing it server-side, you have to rely a lot on statistical analysis and it’s all game specific.
In the end you can, of course, reduce it all to not shelling out money, but there is some nuance too.
Arguably Ghostbusters (1984) is prior art for throwing a capsule and capturing 🤣
Edit: they even had a video game with the ghost trap.