I think right now all of the Kindle e-ink devices can be jailbroken to be less restrictive, so if you have sources for DRM-free ebooks (Baen and a few other publishers and sites sell them) they’re a lot easier to use on the device you already have.

No, that’s Florida.

Timberborn is awesome. I play on the stable release (non-experimental branch) through Proton experimental and it runs about as well as it did under Windows. I’m running Bazzite (Fedora) though so my system is much more up to date than Debian, but I bet one of the awesome nerds here could help you get it running on Debian.

Proton DB page for the people smarter than I am, lol

Maybe check your local Craigslist or e-waste recycler? Someone on Craigslist near-ish me has a 10" Dell Inspiron laptop for $25. There’s also a HP mini 110 that the seller is asking way too much for, lol.

That size of laptop/netbook has kind of fallen out of fashion and it seems to be touchscreen tablet-likes in that size now. You’ll want to keep build quality in mind with the older machines because a lot of stuff is soldered together at that size and age, I had a HP Stream 11 and the hardware recently failed - it was e-waste when I bought it but it ran Linux well until it died.

Thinkpad made 10" models?

… I found the Thinkpad 10, which is a tablet computer and a bit ridiculous for OPs intentions (or mine, for that matter, I’m looking for me too, lol).

Edit: the comment I’m replying to didn’t mention size when I replied.

Bazzite has been great for me. Bluetooth, Nvidia GPU, controllers, Bluetooth controllers all worked out of the box, and it’s based on Fedora so you get all of those perks, and the rollback feature, which comes by default, works (to an end user) rather like timeshift (I think - it lets you return to the previous working configuration if an update has a problem, which admittedly did happen to me recently, I just rolled back and waited for the devs to fix the problem the next day, lol).

It doesn’t have a live boot option so it just has to be installed to try it, which is disappointing.

But I totally get if OP wants to take a break and maybe come back to Linux in a few years, because Linux will keep getting better and Windows will keep getting worse.

OP seems to be running 8gig of ram, if that laptop is stock. I have actually run Bazzite Gnome on worse hardware (2 gigs of ram), but that was for the lulz, not because it was a good idea. Silverblue is Gnome DE, and OP seems to want a much lighter weight DE than either gnome or KDE.

IME, Debian is fairly minimal tinkering once you get the proprietary drivers worked out. Although I don’t know how Ubuntu handles updates, is it as (usually) hands off like the immutable/atomic distros?

Has someone tried to do an atomic/immutable distro with one of the lightweight DEs? Seems like there’s a niche there, although Mint might be similar enough from an end user experience standpoint that it’s not really worth the effort.

In the 00s there were these special walkie-talkies that would set up an independent mesh network to communicate without cell service or internet connectivity. That was more peer to peer than federation, I guess, but it’s a pretty cool invention that was only used to send messages between Barbie coloured pieces of plastic.

Meshtastic is trying to do something similar right now, I’m not sure how much Barbie colored plastic is involved though. I wonder what kind of tech those were using, I’ve never heard of it before and Google isn’t being helpful.

… Wait, are you taking about Cybiko? I wanted one of those when I was a kid even though I didn’t know anyone who had one and didn’t live somewhere with the density to really use the tech.