Have you considered the macbook neo, it’s not a Linux machine, but it is probably the cheapest machine that fits the glorified tablet footprint. I don’t understand the draw to something that basic and lightweight, but if it mattered to me I would probably go with that. Otherwise, as others have pointed out, some flavor of Linux will run on just about anything that isn’t ARM at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if an old netbook would just work for your use case with a lightweight distro.

The systemd thing was just a header, I don’t disagree that it is a step towards age verification, but as far as I am concerned, there is no reason to take drastic measures until that header is actually used in the init system. Your earlier idea of determining the distros position I think will be a better metric as the distro is the more likely entity that will try to implement it.

As an aside, I actually like the systemd header since it will essentially standardize the place for age attestation which assuming your distro doesn’t stop you, you could just pipe some bogus birthday into the field. This is of course assuming the init system doesn’t implement the attestation mechanism.

I’m not sure what you mean by fork Linux, are you referring to the kernel? In which case I would say that it is already meaningfully developed by Europeans, if you meant something different I don’t see the vision.

The number one shock for most people when coming over to Linux is a reliance on package management for programs rather than the exe’s & msi’s of windows. In general on mint your installation methods in order should be

1.software manager 2.appimage 3.deb 4.tar

I may have forgotten some other formats since I haven’t used mint in a while, but this should allow for the smoothest experience when it comes to installing programs.