Well you’ll hate to hear who contributes most to the linux kernel in that case…

If it’s for work, I’d suggest using whatever works for you best. Sounds incredibly frustrating so I don’t know why’d you be so set on ditching windows. Use the tools that work for you. Having said that, I’ve been running Linux since early 0.99 kernels and Debian since 1.3 and stability is really unmatched these days.

Your screen flicker issues with browser sound like hardware acceleration related bugs and I’d hazard a quess that random freezes and reboots have something to do with graphics drivers as well. But of course it’s impossible to tell without logs, which you didn’t provide.

I generally try to use RSS feeds, but I’ve come to realize this doesn’t really work too well with current-/world news, because it becomes a firehose that drowns my entire feed. So these days, I just have my other interests in RSS feeds and use the BBC and The Guardian front pages to quickly get a summary of current events. I also visit my local newspaper site for headlines (they put their stuff behind paywall though, so it’s just headlines).

I’ve culled my social media to Lemmy and Mastodon and I use pretty aggressive word filtering on Mastodon to get rid of topics I’m not very interested in.

It’s not perfect by no means, but I haven’t really found anything else that works. I wish I had some better way to follow European and African news and commentary, but everything (apart from manually visiting sites) seems to always result in a firehose of news that drowns all other sources.