My base starting point parts list (full build with 9800x3d, 64GB/4TB, 9700xt) was 2000usd about five months ago when it was last used to base a build on.

It’s currently ‘down’ to about 3400 after peaking last week at over 3500. The excess is nearly entirely from RAM and SSD prices.

‘removed from public access, but retained for our own or for legal purposes’

yea, they do.

g.skill was probably just the ‘easy target’ for the legal vultures.

you don’t need “everything”… and if you did, you’d perhaps also need to recreate the entire working windows environment. so make full hdd backup image to satisfy that requirement—or, don’t reformat and reuse the drive, just pull it as-is for safekeeping–executing a full shutdown first: shutdown /s /t 0

as far as the user files go… this is the basics of what i do (migrations for home users is about half of my workload):

copy user libraries (the default locations windows saves your files to) for each user account:

robocopy c:\users(windowsuserprofiledir) d:(destinationonexternal) /e /dcopy:t /copy:dt /xjd /xa:sh /xd appdata /r:1 /w:1 /mt:2

put each user’s files into their own destination directory.

use care when backing up directories linked to or taken-over by cloud services (looking at you, onedrive). make sure the files copied actually exist on the destination drive.

export bookmarks and saved passwords from every browser and browser profile from each windows user account.

backup steam or its directories for later restoration, if wanted.

save mailstores from local mail clients. not many home users run a mail client with local stores anymore. the windows-only free-to-use (but not foss) ‘mailstore home’ in portable mode run off an external might be useful (yes, it can run in a vm later if needed). don’t forget to jot down mail server configs.

check ‘public’ and other places for stray files.

optionally, backup browser profile directories, zip 'em up (fastest compression is enough). if you restore entire profiles, you might preserve more of the browser environment… but chromium ones will still choke on logins, so having password exports is critically important. most people are fine with just having bookmarks and passwords migrated–which are easily backed up, and normally what i restore instead of entire profiles (unless it’s firefox to firefox, and windows to windows).

make sure you know the credentials for and can login to important sites and services from a different pc or a private window without leaning on saved sessions in existing browsers on the current windows pc.

if there’s something else specifically that you want to save, like a wallpaper that you don’t have the original source file for… a quick web search will likely reveal its location.

my flatpaks and appimages consume a hell of a lot more space than silverblue itself (which is essentially just a ‘browser launcher’ with an appstore ‘out-of-the-box’).

(and then there’s the data, which uses even more)

it really depends on what demands you are going to place upon the system…

gaming? have weird hardware? you’re gonna visit a command line and have to ‘research’ things…

but just basic tasks and well-supported hardware? many can give a mostly or even entirely ‘point and click’ experience.

i have a number of users on silverblue and endless that would be terrified if they ever had to open a terminal, and i rarely open a terminal on my own desktops (xfce manjaro, cinnamint, endless, silverblue)

we’re safe from that particular method here in the boonies. we’re lucky to even have one tower from any provider within range anywhere around here.

the twin cities doesn’t have a ‘chinatown’ or a ‘little italy’–they have little canada

it looks like cachyos just makes available anything in arch’s repos that worked for them at that time.

any upgrade or update can ‘break’ something.

mint does have an upgrade path from one major version to the next. the upgrade tool might not be available immediately upon the release of the next version, but in your case it has been around awhile.

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrade-to-mint-22.html

backups are, of course, your responsibility, as is any unexpected manual customizations or software added from outside mint repositories.

both. and all your friends and ‘friends’, too.

in my rural part of the u.s., the telco only sells dsl to a max of 10 mbps (and as slow as 384kbps if you’re at the end of the signal’s reach–at which point they also charge you more for the shit-tier speeds)… even if you’re literally next door to their central office… and even if they don’t have fiber down your street (which is their reasoning for the artificial limit–to push people towards fiber so they can pull the copper).

televisions of the near future when you first turn them on: “Internet connection and account required to complete initial product set up.”

… which, in firefox, is either off by default or can be switched off.

i have my boss’s old one here that’s pretty much only used for testing mobile web and for its camera. i use a ‘dumb’ phone, and its camera doesn’t work (was crap-tier anyway when it did). i think it has 10 on it. it doesn’t leave the office, doesn’t get used that much, and has no google account linked to it anymore since it was totally reset when it was replaced earlier in the year… the inability to use google play to install a few apps reduces its usefulness. i got f-droid on it but not everything is available from it.

it was at 50 percent in aug 2024’s survey… that last 15 percent to 65 took over a year to achieve.

They dropped 7, 8, and 8.1 at the same time, January 1st 2024

the actual ‘end of service’ dates for win7 (with the max 3 years esu) and 8/8.1 all occurred during the first half of 2023… so they gave a whole six months of extra life on those versions.

if that’s all you need it to do: browser, kitra, libreoffice and not much else… any mainstream distribution will work.

fedora’s ‘atomic’ distributions tick your boxes. minimal terminal exposure, hard to break, and infrequent demands of user password.

silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde). kde is a traditional desktop experience, but gnome would be excellent for your rather basic set-up.

my guess is someone big wants it and offered to pay enough to fund it, so canonical is just opening up the same support timeframe to anyone willing cough-up some cash.

the data collection is all but expected these days… what should be the headline is the remote kill switch the manufacturer used on the guy’s device… repeatedly.