You're right and wrong. For nonviolent offenses you're right. For offenses where there actually isn't a victim (drugs, prostitution, etc) you're definitely right. But for violent offenders, rapists, murderers, chomos, I don't agree. I don't want them near me and honestly I don't care to rehabilitate them. If they're guilty beyond a doubt, for those crimes, might be better to take them behind the chemical shed and put a bullet in their head. But, we can be convinced of guilt and be wrong, so jail is a good compromise.
As long as they're using UUIDs where they should be the possibility of a collision is literally so low as to be impossible, but that relies on all the pieces of software using good principles.
Exactly like you think. Cronjob runs a periodic rsync of a handful of directories under /home. My OS is on a different drive that doesn't get backed up. My configs are in an ansible repository hosted on my home server and backed up the same way.
It was also a lot more expensive than Windows 9x/me, so most consumer desktops went that way. The only people running 2000 were professionals and nerds that weren't running Linux.
You'll still be using a Chromium based browser. Best bet is to switch to Firefox.