it really depends on what demands you are going to place upon the system…

gaming? have weird hardware? you’re gonna visit a command line and have to ‘research’ things…

but just basic tasks and well-supported hardware? many can give a mostly or even entirely ‘point and click’ experience.

i have a number of users on silverblue and endless that would be terrified if they ever had to open a terminal, and i rarely open a terminal on my own desktops (xfce manjaro, cinnamint, endless, silverblue)

we’re safe from that particular method here in the boonies. we’re lucky to even have one tower from any provider within range anywhere around here.

the twin cities doesn’t have a ‘chinatown’ or a ‘little italy’–they have little canada

still does.

it looks like cachyos just makes available anything in arch’s repos that worked for them at that time.

any upgrade or update can ‘break’ something.

mint does have an upgrade path from one major version to the next. the upgrade tool might not be available immediately upon the release of the next version, but in your case it has been around awhile.

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrade-to-mint-22.html

backups are, of course, your responsibility, as is any unexpected manual customizations or software added from outside mint repositories.

both. and all your friends and ‘friends’, too.

in my rural part of the u.s., the telco only sells dsl to a max of 10 mbps (and as slow as 384kbps if you’re at the end of the signal’s reach–at which point they also charge you more for the shit-tier speeds)… even if you’re literally next door to their central office… and even if they don’t have fiber down your street (which is their reasoning for the artificial limit–to push people towards fiber so they can pull the copper).

televisions of the near future when you first turn them on: “Internet connection and account required to complete initial product set up.”

i remember “playing” typer shark a long time ago. i think it still exists somewhere today.

i suck with the number row, too, because i was ill and in the hospital during that part of the term i took a typing class during high school. text i can do at ~ 100wpm and i’m a monster on 10-key, standard or inverted. while i am getting better in the decades since, the number row and the symbols on it still slow me down.

… which, in firefox, is either off by default or can be switched off.

some states do not have front plates.

I don’t even piss standing up anymore

the correct solution.

it could be worse.

i have my boss’s old one here that’s pretty much only used for testing mobile web and for its camera. i use a ‘dumb’ phone, and its camera doesn’t work (was crap-tier anyway when it did). i think it has 10 on it. it doesn’t leave the office, doesn’t get used that much, and has no google account linked to it anymore since it was totally reset when it was replaced earlier in the year… the inability to use google play to install a few apps reduces its usefulness. i got f-droid on it but not everything is available from it.

if that’s all you need it to do: browser, kitra, libreoffice and not much else… any mainstream distribution will work.

fedora’s ‘atomic’ distributions tick your boxes. minimal terminal exposure, hard to break, and infrequent demands of user password.

silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde). kde is a traditional desktop experience, but gnome would be excellent for your rather basic set-up.

pictures are taken by sorting machines of every piece of mail that goes through usps. that data is retained by the usps for a period of time, and is open to ‘law enforcement’ on request; and who knows what really happens to that data when the usps doesn’t want to hold it any longer.

rotisserie chickens are bred for that purpose and their lives are cut short to meet the cost and weight targets of the largest customers (walmart, etc), which means the facilities can produce ‘more’ in the same amount of time than roasters. they cost $6-10 here and $5-6 on sale (higher $ is at the regional convenience store chain, lower is wm), and i can frequently find ‘old’ ones in the cooler at wm marked down to $2 (yea, just two bucks each).

roasters are larger, priced by weight, and usually cost more (per bird) than rotisserie chicken. here, they’re $10-12 at wm, $15 and up at the ‘local’ grocery store. they’re rarely on sale.

and some are, apparently, obscure af:

“an issue with decoding LucasArts Smush codec, specifically the first 10-20 frames of Rebel Assault 2, a game from 1995.”