I thought I was the only one, it's just so easy to use it as your base working folder. Things get organized out as whatever it is moves forward to some arbitrary point.
jcarax
I absolutely adore being able to click into and between genres and artists to get to albums and songs instantly. I want to ultimately move back to MPD, maybe Navidrome or Subsonic, but... I just love Quod Libet.

To be fair, the bezels were huge by today's standards, and one of the main (non-Apple) competitors had a hardware keyboard below the screen. Just think how much more usable these old smaller phones would be, if we had the screen to body ratio of the Pixel 9a.

Yup, I jumped around a lot early on, but Debian was home. It's hard to break if you follow the Debian way, and it's definitely stable. I still use it for server and lab stuff, because I can write a doc and come back in 18 months and is still largely reproducible.
I've used a LOT of distros over the years, and Arch is home now (technically Cachy at the moment), but Debian is probably my second favorite. Fedora is 3rd, for user friendly polish.
It's better than the OSS days, at least. And I dare say Pipewire is better in most situations than Alsa, can't really speak for Jack. It's really trying to be that unifying, centralizing force that allows us to move past the Frankenstein mess. But, well...

I believe the search term you're looking for is 'multi-seat'.
Yes. Make sure you're installing the beta, they never really release stable anymore from what I can tall.
Unfortunately, that might just mean that this is when the truly scary part begins, as they start trying to keep a grasp on their dreams of absolute power.
I was thinking the same with my 7840u. Could try something a bit more cutting edge than Mint, though I will admit I have no idea how up to date they keep the kernel these days. Though if they live boot, they're removing the SSD and likely qtile from the equation, so it's a bit tricky to isolate.
I came up using primarily Fluxbox and XFCE, and could tolerate Gnome 2. Had a love/hate relationship with Gnome 3 for awhile. Never really liked any version of KDE, but...
I used Cosmic for about a year, just switched to KDE last weekend. For me, Cosmic is the first Wayland DE to hit that sweet spot of lightweight window manager feel, with a few conveniences like integrated panels, notification bus (which is bidirectional, unlike KDE's), small application suite, and some useful applets. I'm always tempted to go back and roll my own with LabWC and god knows what at this point, because it's not quite what I want ideally, but it's quite good.
It's still a bit buggy, recently I started having an issue where windows would lose their position and size after minimizing and restoring. I've long had that issue after unlock. Others feel differently, but tiling has never been great for me, I hope they rework it, or introduce more customizable snapping without the rigidity of full tiling.
But it's lightweight and clean, fairly customizable (compared to Gnome, not KDE), and generally sane. We'll see how Budgie and XFCE come along on Wayland, they both have a far more mature DE as a whole, but Cosmic does have a head start on Wayland, and has the benefit of being a fresh code base.
I'm hoping Cosmic, along with the lightweight DE ports (?) to Wayland, kick start development of more lighter weight, non-DE-centric applications with native Wayland support.
Yes, but CachyOS might not be, and while it does a bit to make things substantially easier for your friend, you'll have a lot of familiarity with it as an Arch user.
Source: An Arch user for 15 years who just installed CachyOS when I wanted to switch from Cosmic to KDE.
This whole damned division is just trying to hang on for dear life.