VHS [he/him]

The distros such as Debian, Fedora, Arch, and Ubuntu make all kinds of DEs available to the user to install. Gnome is not in charge of this, and even if they were, the suggestion that they would make other DEs unavailable is childish. You have plenty of choices

Soulseek

It’s not CentOS 3, it’s CentOS with Linux kernel 3.10 (a 2014 kernel). This was supported in RHEL/CentOS through 2017.

Still very dated, of course. I’ve worked in stores that were using Windows Vista and 7 years past their EOL as well. Hopefully it’s isolated from the Internet.

I’ve always used XFS on spinning drives and F2FS on SSDs. No issues, they’re very solid

Were you watching 4K77 and 4K83 with Digital Noise Reduction? The movies are distributed in two versions, one with film grain and the other with DNR.

I’m not familiar with exactly what you mean, does it not require a password to boot that way? I have full-disk encryption on my laptop but not with TPM, grub just prompts me for a password before the kernel boots

What it sounds like you want is only your home folder encrypted, where it decrypts seamlessly upon login. It sounds like you have encrypted OS root, which is more secure but necessarily requires a password before the system gets to the login screen.

Other than reinstalling your system, you do have the option of either making your decryption password shorter, and/or enabling auto-login after boot (if you’re the computer’s only user), so you’d only have to type one password instead of two.