It used to be pretty terrible, but the frameworks are getting there, starting with the languages they are based on.
Believe it or not, Java has been optimized a ton and can be written to be very efficient these days. Another great example of a high-level, high-efficiency language is Julia. And then there is Rust of course, which basically only sacrifices memory-efficiency for C-speeds with Python-esque comfort. It's getting better.
Second this. What you need for high quality media is space, not speed. For any single stream, network and drive will be fast enough anyway. Your typical HDD offers like 4-6 times the bandwidth that a regular Blu-ray can provide. You can get 8TB HDDs for the price of 2TB SSDs. Random access doesn't matter for that application.
You might want to invest in redundancy and use a RAID 1 or RAID 10 array, depends on how valuable that media is to you or how long it would take to recover in case it's lost. A simple solution would be a btrfs software RAID, in case your are after something like a Linux home media server with Jellyfin.
Tbf, you could use portable / user installs (if everyone would actually do their apps right), you can (now) use a package manager and you can (sometimes...) get an official, verified version of an app through the store and even if not, installers are (usually.....) signed these days (although criminals do apparently get signatures too........)... And then this all falls apart, because you need a random driver from a random website. Security 👉👉
Compared to Arch(-based): Accesing the latest packages. It's not impossible, especially if you go for Debian testing repos, but it's definitely extra work.
Compared to special-purpose distros (i.e. gaming, portable, high security/privacy, pen-testing): Whatever their special purpose is will usually be harder to achieve.
Compared to huge corpo distros (SUSE/Fedora and derivatives): Ease of more intricate setups and maybe some security testing.
Compared to Ubuntu: Paying a corporation to not withhold security patches from you.
Ingl, this sounds like exactly the thing I want. Immutability aside, this is how I use EndeavourOS right now, but more sophisticated.
I'm sold on it.
Ingl, the amount of dislikes made me grunt a little
In short: No. It's getting better, but Flatpak is by no means secure. Think of it as a Windows .exe or .msi with some (not that hardened) rights management.
In addition, Flatpaks afe often community made and not even "signed" (which is not really a thing in Flatpak to begin with (yet) ((afaik))).
Something really secure would be a container, something really, really secure would be a VM, something really, really, really secure would be a separate machine. Flatpak is less secure than the least secure thing in this enumeration.
Well, I did preconfigure Endeavour a bit, but still, it runs just fine :D Being on KDE is a huge help, Windows users feel pretty much right at home.
Have you considered using pipx + poetry?
I threw my brother and my dad into EndeavourOS and Garuda respectively. So far, they are swimming. My brother even does almost all his gaming on Linux.
(Well OK, apart from my dad generally yelling at everything tech. I guess that's where I got it from.)
I think you're forgetting where Linux was the most successful by far: Servers and Android. Server guys do what they want, if you tell them they can only use software you allow them to, they will laugh at you and buy their data center elsewhere. Android has had locked bootloaders forever (I actually think even my very first phone had one).
So maybe development would have been harder? I mean, we don't have looked bootloaders on desktop even today, not really locked at least, so it's hard to tell. Linux's main audience would not have cared I think.
Love how 2/5 comments suggest using KDE (like any sane person) and I totally wasn't going to do the same (like any sane person).