As long as the PC isn’t being connected to the internet, there’s no reason you can’t just keep running an old kernel.

Banking can be done in person at the bank. Games and media can be pirated.

I used to run RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 1 and it was able to play most of the SNES games I tried. Of course that was with no shaders or upscaling.

Download some live boot images, use Rufus to write them to flash drives, boot them up and try them out. I would suggest starting with something like Mint or Fedora. When you find one you like, back up your data, run the installer and follow the prompts.

A lot of distros disable the functions of the magic sysrq key for security reasons. If it’s enabled, it should work as long as the system is still capable of reading keyboard inputs.

There’s also the Belling-Lee connector. It’s been around since 1922 and is still commonly used for radio and TV antennas in Europe.

You could get a Hetzner storage box. They have unlimited traffic, but only allow 10 simultaneous connections.

You shouldn’t have any issues with MakeMKV and normal blurays. 4K blurays can only be ripped with certain drives and they need custom firmware.

Gnome Disk Utility lets you manage the mount points from a GUI. There are probably other programs that can do it too.

If you bought the game, all you would have to do is click install and Steam would have done all of the setup for you. If you pirate, then you have to do that work yourself. It’s not particularly difficult, but it takes more than just double clicking on an exe file.

If you have a keyboard that can run the QMK firmware, you can remap keys and run macros in the keyboard.

You could write a simple bash script that will launch it, wait for it to open, then use wmctrl to position the window wherever you want it.

There is ddccontrol and ddcutil for controlling desktop monitors. There is also the ddcci-driver which adds a device to /sys/class/backlight so you can use programs that would normally be used for controlling a laptop backlight.

My DVR and IP cameras are on a network with no internet access. My server has access to the camera network and I can connect to the server over a VPN for remote viewing. I definitely don’t trust the DVR or the IP cameras. They are constantly trying to connect to a bunch of different IP addresses, some of which are in China.

They could also use treated waste water for cooling the data centers instead of dumping it in the ocean.

Libreoffice Draw is the best option. You need to make sure all of the fonts used in the PDF are installed on your computer before editing it. The embedded fonts can’t be used for editing. If you are missing a font, Draw will try to find a substitute, which will most likely mess up the spacing. You can go to File->Properties in a PDF viewer like Okular or Xreader to get a list of the fonts that the PDF uses.

Most PDFs aren’t intended to be edited. The incorrect text splits are an issue caused by the program that created the PDF.

Two programs not being able to use the sound card at the same time is what happens when you set a program to use an ALSA hw or plughw device instead of PulseAudio or PipeWire.

I’ve been using Linux as my main operating system since 2010 and can’t recall having any audio issues. My desktop has 5 sound cards and they all work fine. I don’t use bluethooth for audio, so I guess that makes things easier.

Linux audio issues were common during the transition to PulseAudio, but that was almost 20 years ago now.

Do they need to play on a set top DVD player? If they are going to be played on a computer, you can reencode to a modern codec and burn them as data DVDs.