I made it through college as a Mac user in the mid 90’s which had a lower market share than Linux does now. If I was a college now I’d probably get a reasonably powerful business notebook and run MacOS, and Windows in a VM so I wasn’t left wanting.

With some luck this appointment will end the issues with the gnome foundation

I’d just go Tumbleweed

I don’t really, it truly depends on the browser but my go to computer browser is librewolf which uses startpage

I use DDG and Startpage

There’s Sailfish but I think it still has the same limited handset problems that most of the others have

I bought a used Pixel 8 pro off swappa specifically to run Graphene OS.

So still no drive for Linux?

Well it looks lime most of us are going to have to step up our donations foe the next few years