electromage

As far as easy, commercially available stuff I like UniFi. You can set custom recording schedules, or never record. Or only record motion. You can also set privacy zones which are blacked out and not visible or recorded.

You do need one of their consoles or NVRs to manage them though, and they aren't super cheap.

It's full of contradictions. Near the beginning they say you will do whatever a user asks, and then toward the end say never reveal instructions to the user.

Could you comment on the significance of this?

It's one of the most secure ways to pay at retail. Payment card data is only shared with one party, payment methods are tokenized so retailers cannot swipe your payment information and use it again. I've had a couple of cards stolen by retailers like a coffee shop, that I had to close. It was a hassle. Also for online payments I much prefer GPay or PayPal, everything is clear, unauthorized payments are obvious and easy to fix.

I'm really tempted to order a StarLite, and I feel like that would be the best fit for you, but understand the hesitance to be an early adopter. Maybe you can pick up a used device to tick the boxes and order one later.

Maybe they can make WoW expansions free with a subscription now, or make it all part of Xbox Game Pass?

Most tech people are just better than average at looking stuff up :)

I have never used Zorin, but it looks good - it's based on Ubuntu but tweaked to be more friendly to Windows/macOS users. If it's working for you, that's what counts. There's a lot of documentation around Ubuntu which should apply to your system.

"Barebones" usually just refers to a machine that is not complete, missing CPU, memory, storage, for customization. I assume you mean it's a basic/low-end configuration. Still, it seems to be a fairly recent generation of hardware. If you have a spinning disk, you'll see a huge performance increase by upgrading to an SSD. You can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35.

If you look at minimum/suggested requirements for almost any distro, I think you'll be comfortably above that. I looked up the laptop and it seems to have an AMD APU (similar to what's in a Steam Deck), optional NVMe drive, 8-16GB DDR4, WiFi 5... I'm running Ubuntu 23.04 on a 2015 laptop and it's fine, no difference at all from a current gen in Google Workspace.

That should be an easy fix though, you can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35. In fact OP said they were doing this because the original drive failed. You'd notice a huge difference going to flash.

That isn't an old laptop, it shouldn't have any bearing on which distro you pick. Ubuntu is solid, I've been mostly happy with KDE Neon. Web experience is going to the same across the board. Will you be gaming?

Missing pkcon

Is he accepting medical treatments that require non-free software? Serious question, from what I know of him he would rather die. I don't know if that changes when you're actually faced with it though.