I played WoW through Lutris (and later Bottles) with minimal issues for all of classic TBC and WotLK. Basically use either platform to install and run the Battle.net client, and then use bnet to install any blizz apps like normal. I used WowUp to manage addons. WoW should not be a blocker for you.
That said, I'm thoroughly done with blizzard's shit and won't be playing wow anymore.
Just so you know, this is called Moral Nihilism, and it seems to me about as useful as a physicist saying, "none of our models are 100% accurate, therefore they are all completely useless".
Like, yeah we agree that ethics is a construct we've invented, and no ethical system is perfect, and none of them ever will be. But that doesn't translate to them all being useless. I know we're living in a stressful time, and I understand the feeling of wanting to just flip the table and give up, but please recognize that as a purely emotional response, not a rational one.
Package managers tend to assume they are the only ones touching files in /usr/share. You will find if you try to change any files there, the next update may delete or download a new version of the file, stomping your changes. Instead your local changes should go in /usr/local (if you want something system-wide) or ~/.local (if it only applies to a specific user).
Ex. If you made a custom .desktop file to show up in your app launcher, or a custom .xsession file to show up in a login manager.
As a technical user, I think of WSL as almost exclusively for technical users. It's not really intended to enable normal users to run Linux programs, and more as an excuse to convince companies to keep developing on Windows. If the devs say "we need to write backend code for Linux servers, so we need our dev machines to run Linux" then management sets them up with linux, while the rest of the company uses windows. But if MSFT says "hey look, you can develop code for Linux in windows, and you can even deploy it in windows on our azure servers" then management says "great, everyone can use windows" and keeps buying those licences.
A CSV file should work.
Hey, putting their money where their mouth is, I don't have a problem with that.
I get that sharing confidential info is not allowed, but a blanket "any unauthorized communication with the media" restriction sounds to me like a first amendment issue.
But also, ethically, employees should always report confidential info if it is a crime or otherwise threatens someone's livelihood. And I'm not sure what data the Dept of Labor would have that should not be reported publicly to tax payers (besides PII).
I'd like to report Doug Collins for hate-mongering rhetoric that seems pretty anti-Christian to me.
Re: modding
Nothing is consistent with modding. The idea of a game having "modding support" is a relatively recent concept. For most of gaming history, "modding" meant hacking the game (or sometimes hardware) to do what they want in spite of the creator's intentions, rather than in accordance with them.
All that said, if you can get a vanilla windows binary running on Linux, getting mods working is usually the same process that it is on windows, especially if the mod is just swapping out files. The same files exist somewhere in your Linux filesystem and can be tampered with just like they can on windows.
If the mod involves running a 3rd party tool to edit a process' memory in real time, that could be more involved since the windows version of the tool might be making some assumptions that are not necessarily valid when running in a Linux wine/proton environment. In order to get it working, you may need technical knowledge of how the mod is doing what it's doing.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
It depends on how often you play games with aggressive anti cheat, or games on non-steam platforms. Games like Valorant and Fortnite probably won't work at all. But I do a ton of non-competative multiplayer (and single player) gaming that is not inhibited at all.
Heroic launcher is your best bet for non-steam platforms (GoG, Epic, Amazon), and lutris/bottles should probably be your 3rd option (I've used both for battle.net). But steam games running through proton should "just work".
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
The actual modding should be arguably more accessible. You technically have control over the entire kernel, so nothing is going to stop you from doing whatever you want. The only problem you may run into is if you're dependent on modding tools that were only made for windows. Some of those tools are basically spyware anyway (ex. Curse), and often times the open source community has made its own alternative you should be using instead.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
YMMV. Valve has done a lot of heavy lifting to get proton to be a one-stop-shop for running windows games on Linux but you can add a program as a non-steam game, launch it through steam, and it often just works.
Wine is your other option. Sometimes the community has gotten windows apps running reliably in wine or proton, other times no one has ever tried it or it's too much of a headache to get working. protondb.com has user reports for how various games run.
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
The short version is yes. The long version is the same as the previous answer.
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a "Linux Update" program like what Windows has?
Most distros come with some form of package manager that works similarly to an app store on your phone (an app store is basically a package manager with purchases). Ideally, everything you want to run can be installed through the distro's package manager, and then you use the package manager to update everything. But sometimes the software doesn't exist in the package manager, and you have to download, run, update, and sometimes even build from source, your own programs. Those programs usually have a guide on the best way to run it on popular distros.
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
It is actually more secure due to being open source. Source code can be audited by anyone rather than relying on "security by obscurity". There are antivirus programs, but I don't know much about them. Generally, don't run programs from shady sources, don't expose your machine to the open internet, and don't run everything as root and you should be fine.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Yes, though historically AMD has better support for the newer features asked for by Linux compositors (namely Wayland). Nvidia's drivers are still not fully open source, but otherwise work fine. Driver bugs are rare in my experience.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
To the same extent that windows can, yes. But if your concern is YOU misconfiguring something to cause Linux to do that, you shouldn't have to worry about it. It is unlikely you will be interfacing directly with the kernel at all. Most distros configure the kernel in some specific way they want and you never worry about it. And still, a proper kernel-level driver should ensure that it will never send commands that could damage something, even if the config vars are incorrect.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
First off, install Ventoy to a USB drive. Then take advantage of Linux's ability to "live boot" by downloading several .iso's for several different distros onto the USB. Then boot off the USB, and you should be presented with a handy menu of ISOs to pick from. This will make trying out a bunch of different options really easy, without actually installing anything to your hard drive.
I'd say try grabbing mint, fedora, Pop!Os, and opensuse to start. Maybe also try Zorin. These are all geared toward new Linux users.
IMO bazzite is too focused on gaming for people to be daily driving it for everything, but hey whatever works. Just hope they're not upset when something breaks and the response from bazzite is "well yeah, that's not something we bother testing for".
(I have bazzite on a HTPC in my living room, and I think it's perfectly suited for that usecase)
IMO Mint, Fedora, or OpenSUSE is going to offer the more stable, user-friendly experience long term. Install Lutris through the distro's package manager, launch it, install bnet through lutris, launch it, install wow through bnet, launch it, Thrall's your uncle 😉.
Edit: to answer your other question, yes Lutris runs as an app similar to how battle.net or steam works on windows. It's just that instead of having a storefront and downloading data directly from a central "lutris" server, it's basically a bunch of community-written scripts to automate the installation and configuration of games from all sorts of places. So when you tell lutris to install bnet, it's running a script that goes and downloads it from blizzard, then locally creates a wine environment, launches the installer in that environment, you install it like on windows, and then it creates a lutris launcher entry for the bnet executable so that when you click play on it in lutris, it will automatically launch it in a wine environment each time.
And it should all work in KDE plasma, gnome, cinnamon, or whatever window manager you're using (the window manager on msft windows is called dwm and it's responsible for the same job).