TDCN

....Me avoiding responsibilities....

Debian. Since so many distros are based of it I always thought of it to be a stripped down, minimal and basic distro, but after daily driving for a year now in suprised how feature complete and pleasent it is out of the box with kde DE.

What's on my USB stick you ask... A bunch of random shit I haven't touched for 8 years so I have no idea what it is and it's probably outdated, but I'd be damned if that usb stick is not In my keychain because "I might need it one day"

Here's an idea. Use a mikrotik router board. They are super cheap and support VPN natively. I use wireguard but it should also support openVPN as well. Maybe more I'm not sure. The small hap series are super cheap and works great.

Mikrotik all the way. But prepare yourself for a nice steep learning curve, but now that om past that i sware by it. Super fast and infinity configurable. The entire router configuration can be exported as a txt file and imported in seconds so if it breaks just get a new one and load up your config and you are good to go. Also the forums are a gold mine of information. What i love the most is just how fast it is. Setting take effect instantly. Also means it is extremely fast to lock yourself out of not careful. Again, steep learning curve but really good after that.

Well, I'm one. Fed up with windows BS.

As a Dane i can say that maybe its because Scandinavians are generally pretty tech savvy and good with digitalisation. Also Scandinavians has a low tolerance for bullshit.

I used this for a project once and its great. Super powerful and has a great API for automation https://kanboard.org/

If you like Ubuntu I can only recommend Debian with KDE desktop (don't install the default gnome DE).

I just switched recently and it's a very clean feeling. No snap and no nonsens. Just stable and trustworthy.

I had an old laptop do this some years ago and it was because the graphics card was broken. I had dual graphic card and found a way to disable the broken one in bios (dedicated one, could continue on intel graphics) but the computer was too old to reliably use much longer and it died even more a few months later.

I can recommend as well. It is maybe not the most beginner friendly OS since it works quite differently than most other OS's unless installed in a curtain way. Iirc. The installer is quite helpful in getting it set up correctly.

I'm surprised noone have mentioned Lubuntu yet. It's a debloated and light weight version of Ubuntu and can run on very old hardware. I've used it in the past before on shitty hardware with great success