I still remember hearing about a Ring 0 exploit in Windows (I may be misremembering, though) that required Ring 0 access. I think if an attacker has access to Ring 0, you’re already screwed anyway.

It was a PS1 emulator and one of the best ones. Shame about the developer.

None of the three things you listed need the CLI, except for a couple of distros. Most distros can use the GUI for those.

Gimp and Blender are both available on Linux. VS Code is on Linux (most coding stuff is on Linux). Linux file explorers work pretty well (Dolphin, for example). I’d recommend Kubuntu, KDE neon or Linux Mint for the distro, all are pretty similar in appearance to Windows. It won’t take much learning with them.

Kubuntu, KDE neon, Debian with KDE.

They already have a Windows version for a handheld. The Xbox runs a modified version of Windows 11. All they’d need to do to bring it in line with PC handhelds is allow the install of third party launchers (they probably wouldn’t do this though).

Mods, remove his balls

I feel like they intended to mention KDE neon (which is the official KDE distro).

It’s not that good. It’s ok (especially now that it’s been unshackled from the hell of UWP), but it’s not as good as most Linux options.

In a nutshell; it works with a lot of tweaks.

Wine can run most of those, not all. You can still dual boot Windows if you need to (VMs are an option, but they aren’t always the best).

easy to install Arch Linux

EndeavourOS or Garuda Linux are closer to that, and both still have their own issues.

Fire OS, but it was just a fork of Android. There are mobile Linux distributions (like postmarketOS), but Fire wasn’t one of them.