I update when I log on, then again before I log off. I use Arch, btw.

Neuromancer by William Gibson contains some similar themes.

TempleOS is the only correct answer.

It’s a good question and years ago I might have asked the same thing. I’m a minimalist and I really dislike all the extra crap that comes with all-in-one distros these days. Not just installed programs, but also daemons and services that start by default. I hate the idea that I have to go in and manually turn them all off on new installs. I used Ubuntu for a long time but slowly got more and more annoyed at the bloat. The snap situation was the final straw that pushed me to explore other distros. I landed on Arch and really liked it. A new Arch install can be incredibly clean, basically providing nothing more than a command prompt from which you can install what you need. The only stuff running on your machine is what you explicitly put on it. There are a couple things I get annoyed with in Arch, like some baked-in drivers for hardware I don’t have, however it’s minor enough that I can let it go. I also played with Gentoo but couldn’t get comfortable enough to make it my daily driver. Arch is my personal best-balance between cleanliness and effort.

Privacy

Mazel tov. The next step down the rabbit hole is to get a tiling window manager like i3.

In the words of Jamie Zawinski, “Linux is only free if your time has no value.”

My work allows RHEL, but it’s a specialized configuration that doesn’t get updated very often. I tried it for a while but it was so out of date that I couldn’t build half the tools I needed, so I ended up switching back to Windows. It was about 10-15 years ago when the C++ standard was undergoing a lot of changes, and the company-approved version of GCC was several years old and didn’t support any of the newest features.

I think the tribalism is mostly in jest. I’ve never actually seen two Linux users seriously fighting over their preferred distro or init system or whatever.