962k. Incredible

Well whatever it was it seems to be working. 876k now. Crossing fingers.

844k now. Wow. I wonder what caused the sudden surge? Or is it just that most momentum can be gain at the start and towards the end like with Kickstarters?

I went with Mint and it is great. Gives me Windows 98 vibes, inca good way. It is really intuitive.

You will need the terminal only for some more advanced stuff and maybe some setup steps, like getting Proton VPN. You really just copy and paste the commands Proton has in their instructions, that’s it. Mint is not officially supported but works fine - only issue I have is that while it launches on startup just fine, I have to connect manually. Support wouldn’t help as Mint is “not officially supported” but that’s about it.

Switching to Linux looks like a monumental task at first, but once you establish a beginer friendly distro you’d like to use it’s really straightforward. I can vouch for Mint in this regard.