LUKS doesn’t protect you from an evil maid attack. It hides your data when your stuff gets stolen in a powered off state, but it provides neither verification of data, nor does it provide verified/secure/safe boot.
In simple terms: the very first thing which gets loaded needs to be unencrypted (barring some exceptions I will omit here), which can get replaced with an evil version by the evil maid.
Yes, with a TPM. A TPM (2.0) can seal secrets and only release it when a machine fulfills certain configuration and state requirements (saved into registers called PCRs).
For example: make the decryption key one part dependant on a passphrase you memorized (to not only rely on a TPM), and one part on something saved in a TPM. If you select the correct PCRs when saving the latter, and your TPM works as advertised (and doesn’t offer an easy way to eavesdrop/fool it), removing the battery would make the TPM not release the secret (if removing the battery even still works on modern machines).
However, this depends on having a unified kernel image, having configured dm-verity and maybe more stuff I don’t recall right now. Probably should also make sure you don’t allow Microsoft’s Secure Boot keys and instead only your own. I hope this will get easier in the future, but I know SystemD is actively developing useful tools for that (e.g. ukify).
That all doesn’t mean the critique of TPMs (intransparent, proprietary) is invalid. Maybe we’ll have OpenTitan based TPMs at some point?
In Wayland programs are supposed to draw their own title bar
That’s incorrect. GNOME does it like this, Plasma doesn’t. KDE came up with a standard so a program can communicate this to the DE, GNOME slept on it. That’s why e.g. mpv doesn’t run well on GNOME.
Oh you’re young, sorry for the offensive wording. I saw you’re programming and trying technology out - good on you! I hope you’ll never lose your excitement about technology.
It’s quite a political thing, but I am sure you’ll find your way around it.
I disagree eight the other poster. Please use whatever distribution you feel most comfortable with!
With KDE Plasma you might want to wait for the upcoming 6 release, since they simplified a lot of stuff (and also Wayland per default iirc?). Kubuntu will take longer than Feodora to ship though.
I personally used Plasma a lot, and I understand the being overwhelmed. What I did was just working with it, and figuring stuff out along the way. I think KDE Plasma is awesome, especially for customization!