Microsoft has largely mitigated this concern by pushing all their fresh updates to the consumers for testing before pushing them to their sensitive business customers.
Explore the trades. Welding and wind turbine repair is in high demand I'm told. With a degree you could potentially find your way into a management position too.
DDG (Try their AI chat!) + Firefox ESR has been my combo. I find DDG does a poor job with local community or very recent results. I often need to switch to google for that. So I'm curious what people have to say. Before the war, I would have suggested Yandex but now I'm not so sure.
Firefox ESR is very customisable with the extensions. But I'm not aware of a solution to have interactive wallpapers. (You could probably make one if you're a tinkerer.)
My personal favourite is "are you sure that's in the design specs?"