To be fair, they changed it in the last couple of years. It used to be that you held the power button to power it off. Now you have to hold the power button AND a volume button for some reason.

Firefox

With open source firmware. Preferably QMK + VIA.

A “factory seconds” framework 13 might fit your budget, and you get a laptop that is easily repairable and upgradeable. The 11th gen i7 version that starts at $500 is what I have been using for a couple of years now and still runs great.

They also have refurbished laptops, but those seem to start a little bit more expensive.

“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening.

Been hearing this for decades.

From the btrfs page on the archwiki

General linux userspace tools such as df(1) will inaccurately report free space on a Btrfs partition. It is recommended to use btrfs filesystem usage to query Btrfs partitions.

apt search KEYWORD

Or

dnf search KEYWORD

Or

pacman -Ss KEYWORD

You don’t even need any hardware to get started. Fire up a virtual machine in VirtualBox or VMWare or use WSL. Start playing around, find a distro/DE you like and start learning.

After some time, look into dual booting your existing machine. You can try this in a virtual machine first before making any changes to you hardware.

Easy Anti Cheat works through Steam/Proton as well. If a game doesn’t work then it is due to the developers’ implementation. It won’t matter what launcher you use.

I ran Lineage on my OnePlus 5 for a few years until I replaced it with a Pixel 8 last month. The first thing I did with it was install GrapheneOS. I have not had any issues so far.

Cyanogenmod became LineageOS. It can be run fully de-googled or with Gapps.

GrapheneOS is also worth looking at.

Both run on modern hardware and are super simple to install.