I went with the lenovo/motorola thinkphone. Kind of an oddball choice, but it has a kevlar back instead of glass, and has most of your points.

The battery is ‘only’ 5000mah, but i get multiple days of use per charge.

There were some pretty good sales on it because it didn’t sell as well as they had hoped.

I run a couple small mailservers. It’s still possible.

I like terminology

It’s quick, gpu accelerated, can natively display images, and I’m not sure what else.

I don’t use the rest of enlightenment de but have stuck with terminology for years

If you don’t care about the benefits of Gentoo, such as the excellent use flags system, then no it’s very much not worth it.

If you’d rather that every program comes compiled with every possible option, and requires every possible dependency because of this, then you’d be better suited by a binary distro.

If, however, you’re the kind of person that wonders “why does my torrent client support sound, which pulls in these five audio dependencies? I don’t ever need it to make noise, can’t I just disable the ability for torrents to go ‘bing’ when they’re done and forego installing those dependencies?”, then gentoo might be for you.

Mandrake is another

For what it’s worth, I’ve found that windows and mac forums have similar issues if you approach them as an outsider.

I feel similar frustration when faced with trying to accomplish things on those OSes. Mac forums in particular are terrible about “you shouldn’t want to do that”.

It doesn’t solve your problem, just wanted to share that I’ve experienced it from the other side.

Unrelated but also kind of related: check out bedrock Linux. It’s a trip.

It lets you ‘hijack’ a Linux install and then you can use package managers and packages from other distros. It’s magical how well it works.

You can if you add to playlist from the search screen.

I keep expecting them to break that workaround, but it keeps working for me

Definitely worth a try for anyone curious.

I’ve been dual booting it since their earlier releases and things are surprisingly smooth now.

Same, though I also enjoyed guayadeque for a period.

No operating system meets those criteria, open source or commercial.

Yep. Half my ram as level one, and then a 500gb SSD as L2.

Definitely more than I need for the L2 as the hit rate is only 15% (vs 99% for ARC), but I don’t think there’s much of a downside to slightly over-sizing it these days (there used to be, but L2 is more ram-efficient now).

Not who you responded to, but I have a similar setup using ZFS.

6 drives in raid 6, and then an SSD cache.

Complete opposite here. Typing this on an iPhone 8, and I’ve never retired a phone sooner than 4 years. Usually I give up around 6 due to lack of updates becoming a problem.

A longer support cycle would definitely sway my purchase decision.

Edit: though I am the type to replace batteries, buttons and screens myself as necessary

For sure. Nothing will ever be as reliable as writing the image to usb/cd/floppy.

The cheaper option would be to set up an ad-hoc tv-to-tv network. You might not let your TV talk to the internet, but I bet your neighbour does, or if not, then their neighbour will.

Monitors are effectively always in ‘filmmaker mode’, as they don’t do frame interpolation and colour grading and over-scanning and all the stuff that filmmaker mode disables.

Have you tried in the past few years? They basically don’t exist anymore in the consumer space.

Not to be argumentative, but in case you’re interested:

According to the ventoy site it supports those images, though openwrt requires a plugin and freedos seems to require using memdisk mode, though I’m less clear on the limitations there.

Ventoy is the easier answer these days IMO. Just drop ISOs on your Ventoy’d usb key and choose them from a menu at boot time.