EponymousBosh

I see people recommending Debian but you also said you enjoy tinkering, so I'd recommend SpiralLinux. It's basically Debian but it uses BTRFS so you can roll back to a previous snapshot if you break something. I don't think Spiral has updated to Trixie yet so you'd need to manually upgrade but that's not too big a hassle if you do it immediately.

So the NVIDIA graphics card is not as big of an issue as it would have been even five years ago. Just use the proprietary drivers. And for my money, Linux Mint is the best distro for beginners, hands-down. You never have to touch the command line and everything just works.

I second this, with the addition that you can also use DistroSea to test-drive distros in your browser. Also, DistroWatch has a search that you can filter by "Beginners" to find some that might be easier.

California is not the center of the universe, but in the US, a fair amount of companies have to tailor their practices to accommodate California law, because A) it's so weird a lot of the time, and B) California is huge and rich, so there's a lot of business to be had. It just makes sense to accommodate the outlier. What happens in California has knock-on effects for the rest of the country, and occasionally the rest of the world; case in point, the recent systemd debacle. It's not certain that they added the age thing in response to the California law specifically, but it was certainly a factor.

A slightly more positive way of putting this is "choosing the set of problems you want to deal with." I vastly prefer the problems that Linux hands me over the problems with Windows.

There's a couple new things being worked on; namely, Wayback and Phoenix.

You're probably right

Honest to God, I thought a "Librephone" was something that already existed. I think I was thinking of the PinePhone or smth.

I block pretty freely, on all social media. Being both trans and religious means that people on any part of the political spectrum might think I'm subhuman, and I don't see the point of engaging when that's the case.

The "sticker" is actually an off-cut from a laptop skin from my other laptop (which also runs Linux, and also has a sticker over its Windows key :P), so it's held up pretty well

I'm petty enough to put stickers over mine.

Maybe SpiralLinux? It's basically just Debian with a few twealks, but the btrfs+Snapper might come in handy if/when you need to do tech support.