I decided to try Fedora Kinoite for my gaming machine (to have something with less “maybe not maintained one day stuff” out of the box and a long term community of maintenance), and have been happy.

I like em-dashes and will continue to use them.

It seems that half the purpose of this is to convince the reader that the author is a great writer, speaking from a position of authority, followed by rather generic advice they generously take time from their busy day to offer: write more so you, too, can get better at writing.

Or perhaps it was all tongue-in-cheek, and I just didn't pick it up.

On the other hand doing a dist-upgrade on Ubuntu has burned me more than once. I fear having to do it on one of my home servers, and should really get off of it.

I'd argue that updating more often is more safe, since anything that goes wrong will be incremental and likely easier to deal with if it does. (Not appropriate for a production server though, you don't want things to change on that unless it's deliberate and likely infrequent)