Oh, Brother.

No seriously, buy Brother printers instead and avoid (at least some of) this enshitification.

Good choices. I too run Librewolf by default, with ungoogled Chromium standing by for the occassional asshat website intentionally designed to work exclusively on Chrome

Take a look at xbrowsersync.org

If you buy a new Pixel and then run an alt rom like graphene or lineage, you're most likeley costing Google money. I believe they manufacture the Pixel at a small loss because they expect to make their money back harvesting and selling your personal data. Denying them that should mean you get decent hardware at a fair price, without really "supporting" Google as much as you fear. I could be wrong, but I've definitely seen that mentioned before.

RFID-blocking leather wallet, keys, phone

For some reason, I don't think the supreme court would agree with that figure.

I can't answer for Mint specifically, but I'm running kubuntu on a similar 2012 MacBook Pro and it runs great for just an old i5 (16 GB ram with an SSD really helps a lot). More importantly, all the Apple hardware is fully supported, right down to the keyboard & screen brightness buttons, volume buttons, etc. Runs way better than macOS ever did.

Interesting! Unfortunately you're too far away for a live session with me, I'm in the US. The singer for my Oktoberfest band lives in Munich, and we tested this already. There's just too much latency to play together live across the globe.

Side note, Jitsi Meet is the tool I use for video though. Jitsi video with Jamulus audio and you've got an impressive working online solution for live music. Bandwidth isn't a huge factor since Jamulus reguires very little bandwidth per channel (and the video doesn't really matter as much). But Latency matters a LOT, and distance from the server has a massive impact on that.

I wish you luck in your endeavor though; I hope it works out for ya!

I'm a keyboardist with extensive experience playing live online. It's really revolutionized rehearsals for my bands actually. I run a low-latency Jamulus server to host live music though. What did you have in mind?

Thanks! We'll try that one again...

Barrier: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Edit: Input Leap looks like a promising KVM replacement for Barrier, thanks for sharing!

I can't speak for your exact model, but I'm running kubuntu on my old 2012 MacBook Pro (with an upgraded SSD and maxed-out 16 GB RAM). My daily driver is a desktop, but I spend almost as much time on the laptop. It's a wonderful experience for my use case, and all the hardware is supported "out of the box".

Maybe try distro hopping a bit to see which experience is best for your usage. Have fun with it!

That's a shame. I have a few promising leads to look into; I'll update this post with my findings and chosen winner once I pick one

Yeah, I'll definitely burn a few ISOs to usb to live test. I'll be sure to update my post with the chosen winner once I pick one.

I can't speak to the paid ProtonVPN service, but their free tier doesn't allow torrenting. They'll disconnect you with a slap on the wrist error about it.

I discovered and installed it a long time ago, but it won't run on my SO's old phone and I haven't been able to convince anyone else I know to help me test it. So, I love the concept but can't vouch for its usability. Widespread user adoption is always an issue with mew privacy or security tech.

No one has mentioned OBS? If I understood OP's need correctly that seems like the obvious choice to me.