electromage

Most tech people are just better than average at looking stuff up :)

I have never used Zorin, but it looks good - it's based on Ubuntu but tweaked to be more friendly to Windows/macOS users. If it's working for you, that's what counts. There's a lot of documentation around Ubuntu which should apply to your system.

"Barebones" usually just refers to a machine that is not complete, missing CPU, memory, storage, for customization. I assume you mean it's a basic/low-end configuration. Still, it seems to be a fairly recent generation of hardware. If you have a spinning disk, you'll see a huge performance increase by upgrading to an SSD. You can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35.

If you look at minimum/suggested requirements for almost any distro, I think you'll be comfortably above that. I looked up the laptop and it seems to have an AMD APU (similar to what's in a Steam Deck), optional NVMe drive, 8-16GB DDR4, WiFi 5... I'm running Ubuntu 23.04 on a 2015 laptop and it's fine, no difference at all from a current gen in Google Workspace.

That should be an easy fix though, you can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35. In fact OP said they were doing this because the original drive failed. You'd notice a huge difference going to flash.

That isn't an old laptop, it shouldn't have any bearing on which distro you pick. Ubuntu is solid, I've been mostly happy with KDE Neon. Web experience is going to the same across the board. Will you be gaming?

Missing pkcon

Is he accepting medical treatments that require non-free software? Serious question, from what I know of him he would rather die. I don't know if that changes when you're actually faced with it though.

Is there any what? What are you trying to do?

So despite what Cory Doctorow said at DEF CON, it seems the government isn't actually saving us?

What do you mean by "better"? Sound is very subjective, can you try to be more specific?

Is this real? People wash chicken? What possible benefit?

Also when the keys are inevitably discovered on an unsecured S3 bucket, everyone will have it! In addition to your billing information and other PII.

This advice will be useless soon.