Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

I'm going to go with a classic and recommend Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I never understood the YTP thing. It was not funny or interesting in any way.

I always thought that a good cup of coffee needs to taste like shit, that's part of the charm. I enjoy coffee, but it's not, like, delicious.

Tea is a fickle mistress, too. It's very easy to make an overly bitter cup of tea, and tea bags tend to taste awful no matter how you prepare them. A good cup of tea takes effort and good quality loose leaf. God I love tea.

Maybe also look into Astrid Lindgren's Bill Bergson books and Ronia, the Robber's Daughter.

Okey, it's like this: You and youtube both generate two keys, public and private. Public keys are public, anyone can see them. Doesn't matter. When you send a message to youtube, you encrypt it with their public key. Now, the trick is, the encryption is asymmetric, which means that the message can only be decoded if you also know the private key, which you never send anyone but keep hidden. Right? This way, as long as your private key is secure, you can not realistically decode the encryption from outside just knowing the public key. Thus setting up a secure connection is just an exchange of public keys.

This is more or less how I understand it.

Ye, Sam is good.

Good questions.

1. Absolutely valid, but also kind of misleading. For a new user the biggest issue is probably picking the DE. Package managers are important, but they all pretty much do the same thing with some syntax differences. There are some edge cases though. If you really want to go through picking your distro piece by piece, look up installing Gentoo. I don't really recommend it, but there it is.
2. You're not going to be really missing anything by installing Mint, I don't think. Distros do have different packages in their repositories, but with Flatpaks, Snaps, AppImages, etc. it's rare to not have something available. And you can always just compile what you need yourself.
3. Librewolf and Strawberry can get me pretty far.
4. Drivers come with the kernel. You can uninstall and install programs according to your needs. Be careful though, always make sure you're not removing something that's an important dependency for other programs. Might lose your whole DE that way.
5. Not really something you should be concerned with, honestly. I personally use KDE Plasma and favor QT based programs because I don't want to pull in GTK libraries, but that's honestly kind of silly. Some people just like to keep their number of installed packages low.
6. Just pick one, really. With experience, you can start to personalize your system. You can try different distros/DEs by booting from a flash drive in to a live environment. No changes will be made to your system and you can see if you like the DE.

Happens about once a year. It doesn't last long, so I just kind of savor the feeling.

I once found a holiday greeting card inside a library book about narcissistic parents and I always wondered if it was just a handy bookmark or a poignant gesture.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.