And fixing this will take decades and fortunes.

CC TLDs usually ask for proof of residence.

When there were ISP-owned routers, I just set a private router on the inside. As long as their box does their job, mine did work for me.

Basically, I do. Kubuntu everywhere. Only exception are the servers that run a UI less version of Ubuntu.

Don’t know about Fedora. And you would have to do odd things to bloat any Linux distribution anywhere near a Winslop system.

My son had a netbook with win10 and office. This ate 27 of the 32 GB the thing had. An “important update” of 8 GB did not work, putting the device in a download and fail cycle.

I installed Linux on this machine - Kubuntu, with LibreOffice and a load of extra software. Took only about 4 GB of space.

If it randomly locks up, try memtest86. It can often be found as a boot alternative in Linux installation images, but it is probably available solo.

As someone who has experienced double failure twice in my lifetime, I seriously recommend doing backups.

The problem is that the only serious backup solution is another HDD for this size. A robot array for tapes or worm drives is probably out of budget.