linux zealots who might blame you for choosing that

I'll defend them. Like pushing for vegan diets, solar energy, and the end of single use plastics. It's annoying, it's not fun but in the long run it's to make the world better for average people.

Google used to be the ultimate engine 15 years ago. Now it's the same 5 sites and 10 ads over and over.

https://www.slax.org/ It's easy, is a full featured desktop, and has persistence on your USB stick.

f. Its an app. The lowest form of tech after the clay tablet.

Did you have a Razor? Best phone I ever had.

E-Mail/sms/irc covers 99% of my text needs.

Debian, based distro.

Works great on low resources.

Only search result is a post you made 10 years ago asking the same question.

I set my 403 to just return "I don't know you."

As of W10 I stopped trusting Windows. Having ads bundled into a >$200 OS shows me that being an OS is no longer the primary goal.

Previous to that I had been using Debian as a media server so the switch was pretty painless. I can play 90% of my Steam library on Linux, edit photos, edit videos, stream, browse, and do literally everything I used to do on Windows.

Python is easy to pick up but it is very different from Java/C/C++ so it may or may not help you in understanding other people's work. If you are just messing around I would recommend looking at Python, Processing.org (Java) and Arduino(C++). If you can solve the same simple problems with all three you will be set for most anything (and you get to play around with Arduinos).