Hahaha! It was a good bet on my part.

You clearly haven't met all of my friends.

Fair point, but I still need a quick way to tell people about upcoming funerals. On the plus side, I'm between the wave of friends' baby photos and the wave of grandbaby photos. Which is nice.

I carry a 2 TB Silicon Power drive on a keychain sometimes.

In addition to an encrypted partition for secure data transport, I keep a fat32 partition that can supplement phone media when I travel.

A few file formatting choices (mp3 or mp4 suffixes) mean that media playback usually works with tvs that I trust, too.

If I need more space, I can temporarily delete a few albums. No big deal.

My most significant run-in with a genie was in Mario Land 3. After what I did to him, I'd hate clouds too.

That multicolor combo is amazing! Makes me wish I had more separate parts to paint when I coated mine.

I upgraded in place from 39 and didn't experience any hiccups on my M1 MBA. Works fine for me.

Paper printing is no big deal if you stick carefully to your first thought about linux-compatible hardware.

I use Brother laser printers whenever I need a hard copy. That brand tends to work well with linux, but research the model number in conjunction with the distribution that you're using before you purchase.

Your point about locked in software is very important. Even in my own industry, some of my earlier jobs relied on custom Windows software for billing, dictation, document creation, and more. A lot of former nonstarters have been pushed to the cloud, but there are still challenges.

Well, dang! I'm sorry to read that. Codecs are definitely a tricky issue for Fedora.

Michael Moorcock's Elric books tick all of the boxes in your list. So do his Corum and Hawkmoon books.

This is a good tip.

I've had to do this before when I ran in to issues with lightdm. Ctl +Alt F-Key to a tty and try the command for your window manager to make sure that your display manager isn't the culprit.

Or don't, I guess. I'm not trying to boss you around. Good luck and let us know what works for you!

I wouldn't be in too big of a rush, especially if you don't have a lot of time to experiment. I gradually switched over when I realized that Sway was meant to be a wayland replacement for i3wm. There were some rough edges at first, but starting about a year ago I switched to Sway on most of my machines. I didn't have any trouble installing sway alongside i3wm and xfce4, and I would highly recommend keeping an x11 option as a fallback when or if something doesn't work.

Initially, I tried out Sway because I heard that most x11 developers were shifting their focus to Wayland and I figured that I should start experimenting with it. I like getting out in front of change. Eventually, Sway shifted from interesting to good enough for daily use. I figure that I'll have less time to play around with my computers in the future, so I might as well try new stuff out now before it gets forced on me.