As I understand it, automatic transmissions are a lot less common in Europe and manuals are almost non existent here in the US. Maybe a manual transmission forces you to be more engaged with driving than an automatic?

It wasn’t just that. I used the first party app so the API changes didn’t affect me. It was how bad they handled the whole situation that made me lose faith that reddit was going in a good direction. That thread “addressing” the changes and concerns was brutal.

I’m not an electrician but I’ve been in a similar spot. If you have non computer stuff that has a ground prong, you can replace a two prong receptacle with a 3 prong GFCI outlet and not hook up the ground. You just need to lable the outlet as “No equipment ground”. GFCI outlets generally come with these stickers since it is a common retrofit. If you hook it up right, any outlet that is GFCI protected downstream could be replaced with a 3 prong receptacle without a ground and would have to be labeled “GFCI protected” and “No equipment ground”. Even though there isn’t a ground, you are protected from electric shock by GFCI. You shouldn’t plug a computer into an outlet like that since computers use ground to filter noise from their power supply and require an equipment ground. If you need an equipment ground, you would need to talk to an electrician.

I remember hearing about System76 a while back. They manage Pop!_OS which comes preloaded on their stuff. I don’t know much more than that. If you are mainly looking to replace your laptop because you don’t want to switch to 11, you could always try out Linux on it with a live USB. Basically you format a thumb drive to act as a boot drive. There are resources online on how to do it and it’s pretty simple. It doesn’t mess with your current install. If you like it, you can fully install it later.

I think that’s true for the arts in general. Unless you are both extraordinary talented and are able to get lots of people to recognize that talent it’s hard to make a living in the arts. Art is a wonderful thing to be passionate about, and it is an important part of life and society despite how some people tend to downplay its value. It’s rarely stable work. There is a reason why there are tropes like the starving artist or actors waiting tables.