Kind reminder that no streaming platform is very good on the ethical front. There are no ethical alternatives because the root of the problem is the legal strangle hold labels and record companies keep on artists and commercial music distribution.
Distros don’t define the UI.
That’s the desktop environment’s work. Many distros will look and feel exactly alike, because they use the same DE.
These are:
GNOME is their own thing, with very opinionated and authoritarian devs. They are not very flexible in their design and development philosophy. That said, Gnome is a very good and quality DE that does have customization, but is also very different to everything else UX wise.
KDE Plasma is very Windows like, because their thing is to be extremely flexible and customizable. But, with sane defaults that look like Windows as closely as possible. So it is very familiar out of the box, though it can be made to look and work into very unique ways. It is also very good and quite polished, aiming to have virtually everything into a GUI or menu, minimizing the need for terminal commands.
Cinnamon is Linux Mint’s continuation of what Gnome used to be like. Which means that it is very similar to pre-Windows 10 but with modern quality of life upgrades and functionality.
Most distros will use one of the first two, and Mint champions it’s own Cinnamon. Other DE’s are for more specialty or niche distributions.
Very few DE’s capture the macOS experience. Mostly because there’s little interest on it from the crowds that use Linux, so they get abandoned quickly. The closest thing currently is Budgie, which had died for a while, but is now revived by a different group of developers.
Put Linux Mint on an USB thumbdrive and play with it until you are comfortable. Be wary it would be somewhat slower than a system installed on the laptop’s drive.
Then, if it is a spare laptop, go ahead and install it. Avoid dual booting, it is more hassle than worth at this stage in your journey. Disable secureboot before installing, or Windows will try to hijack the laptop. You can always re-enable it later if you really want to, but it’s such a bad implementation currently that it doesn’t actually provide much security.
Alternatively: if all you want is to use the computer, without having to worry about the technical details of managing an OS. Try something like Bazzite (for gaming) or Aurora (general productivity) instead. They just work and will (practically) never break.
The trick is to submerge the bag in water before sealing it. It’s not a perfect vacuum, but the water pressure still helps squeeze out the air out of the bag.
Interesting proposal, but I’m thinking it might not be necessarily so. Life expectancy is an average, and averages do not need to be exactly at 50% of the population. That’s the median, you are thinking of the median. It is quite more complicated than that, as there are hundreds of factors that alter life expectancy, thus there are many life expectancy tables depending on gender, lifestyle, cohort, race, income, etc. It will not amount to 50% of the population, specially for populations with a lot of outliers. People who die soon after birth or live exceptionally long lives will skew the average deviating it from a true central tendency. As people live longer and less people die early, then the median (the age at which at least 50% of a cohort, people born the same year, dies) will shift away from the average and occur later. If a lot of teenage and young people die, but the survivors live long lives, then the median will occur sooner. The technical terms are skewness and kurtosis of a probability distribution.
This changes in statistic sources will alter probabilities and thus life expectancy will not correlate directly with the median.
And it is otherwise entirely dull and forgettable. Despite making so much money, it barely made any cultural impact. Nobody quotes Avatar like ever.
Have you read on the history of evangelical Christians during the US civil war? Two different factions of Christians argued both sides, against and pro slavery. Both cited Jesus and the bible, often.
Christianity is anything you want it to be. Proof is on the fact that there are like 45 thousand different Christian denominations, and they all have a different interpretation of Jesus, some diametrically opposite each other. Even the apostols argued with each other about how to interpret Jesus on certain topics. That’s the problem of trying to rule your life under the words and teachings of one single person who may or may not have existed.
This assumes that Christian means “follow the teachings of Jesus Christ”. Unfortunately Christianity has never meant that. Even less in the US since Billy Graham.
Not actively, they stopped trying to make money long ago. Since 2018 you can’t buy anything from them and artists are leaving. No new releases since then, of course.