Born in 2004, I barely used the internet as a kid. Most my video games were off of CDs, and I occasionally got to use my dad's Steam account. In like 4th grade I played some Wizards101, League of Legends, and some flash games, and started watching Minecraft youtubers. Besides that I mostly used the internet to download Minecraft mods. I kinda eased into the internet that way so I never really was surprised at having so much accessible to me.
I didn't get on social media until I got on Reddit in high school. I tried Tumblr a bit but didn't like it since it was too different. I still don't use Twitter or anything, just Reddit and Lemmy and occasionally Pinterest.
It takes some fiddling, but I've been using HDR on Linux since Plasma 6 came out. If you don't have an AMD GPU it would probably be really difficult to set up though.
HDR (and VRR) have been working for me for the past few months (Plasma 6, AMD), but I still keep Windows around for some games and yeah there's no way I'm trying VR on Linux. I think I get noticeably worse performance on Linux as well, I think there's some issue I need to fix with that.
kid3 can apply metadata based on the filename if that's useful for you (just things like title and track depending on how you name your files). I also use it for manually editing metadata once in a while, selecting multiple songs and setting the same artist or album tag is pretty easy to do.
I don't really want Phoronix in my RSS, because they post so many articles every day and it would just clog everything up. I just check them once a day or so and read the interesting articles.
Are you using a scaling factor with x11 legacy apps set to be "scaled by system"? That runs them at a lower resolution and scales them up. You can fix it by either using Gamescope or changing it to x11 apps "scale themselves".
My monitor (Acer XV275K P3) has a better MiniLED local dimming algorithm in HDR mode than in SDR, so even SDR content looks better that way. Also it's annoying having to switch it back and forth, it's way easier to just leave it in HDR mode and not worry about it.
For the washed-out colors, are you using an Nvidia, Intel, or AMD GPU? If you're using AMD you need to run kernel 6.8 or later I believe, if you're using DisplayPort.
I'm not sure why your display lets you adjust contrast in HDR mode, I would just leave it at the default imo.
Amazon Sidewalk?