Not at all. There are many many projects out there which should be killed anyway. Just stop using them.
Nuuskis
Unfortunately I'm not. I'm running numerous Thinkpads until System76 releases their in-house produced Virgo laptop with hot-swappable mechanical keys and open source bios (Coreboot). It'll also have the trackpoint from Thinkpads.
I went from decade with dwm into Alpine + Sway and had zero issues. Actually the opposite, all the screen tearing and multi screen issues are now gone.
Hopefully LMDE6 is a game changer for the most popular first Linux distro. If the CosmicOS by System76 doesn't win that title.
My grandparents were 1,5 years with Mint but LMDE5 has now been for 10 months and it is awesome. Literally 0 issues since day 0 whereas Win7 and Win10 caused constant headaches for me over the phone.
Let's all hope that Fedora dies. Redhat/IBM is already owned by BlackRock.
What I'd like to see is a clipboard history which pastes the content into cursor with just mouse click/enter.
Install Vimium C browser extension and then you press just 'y'-key twice. It means yank in vim.
Kali isn't meant to be a desktop OS. Use it only in VM or in a spare rig. It is meant to be a toolbox. So dual boot it with your daily driver OS or use in a VM.
Your Mac can take Linux just well: https://djharper.dev/post/2020/06/07/running-linux-on-my-macbook/
For your 300 bucks budget look nothing else than Thinkpad T480 or HP Dev One. T480 will need replacement batteries if not replaced yet.
Could you provide a link to the up-to-date feature table/list? I tried to google but couldn't find an informative summary.
If you use Matrix, ask this question VanillaOS group. I got my answers immediadly.
You can configure Qutebrowser for that. In Qutebrowser the insert mode isn't that intuitive as in bloated browsers, but you get used to it.
My Qutebrowser uses Vim keys for scrolling and browsing, but in insert mode I use Emacs keybinds. Best of both worlds (for me).