It doesn't really matter if you make piracy more difficult if you don't make it impossible. Only one person has to figure out how to rip it, then everyone else can watch it
I believe instances generate the preview as soon as it's federated. The problem is that if you have many followers, each of their instances will try to generate a preview at the same time
You can get the switcher in KDE, but you can't get a real equivalent to gnome's view. In gnome you can press super to get the overview, but you can also type to open programs. There's no way to do that in KDE afaik. It's the main thing keeping me from KDE
Yeah when you're downloading from sites like those, there's not a security risk anymore. The thing is that Linux software generally expects you to be using a package manager, so it doesn't update itself. When you download and install debs, you lose auto update functionality. But when you're on a distro like mint with old packages, that doesn't really matter since you're not getting up to date software through the repos anyway
