It's always been there. They did (a long time ago now) move it all the way to the left to prevent people from pressing it all the time. In theory, Android should manage resources well enough that you shouldn't have to use it.
I used to work for Target and Walmart. I feel like there's some overlap between the customers I've experienced at Target and the people that go to Costco. Sure, there were some weird people at Walmart, but at least they'd mind their own business. I swear Karen would try extra hard to go out of her way to interrupt your work for no reason at Target.
I found all sorts of things in carts at Walmart though. People would buy stuff to do their oil change in the parking lot, then literally change the oil and leave the old stuff in a cart sitting in the parking lot. Of course they didn't put it in the corral!
I would just go with Debian personally since it's not updated very often.
You can add Firefox to startup applications several ways, such as startup apps GUI on any desktop environment.
Most desktop environments have an "automatic login" option you can configure. You can also disable or remove the login manager
You can configure some desktop environments (xfce I know for sure) to not launch the panel. Don't forget to also look up how to disable your TTY hotkeys!
Install the unattended-upgrades package and Debian/Ubuntu will update automatically. I hardly ever have to touch the updates on my Debian machines
You can make Firefox's config directory read only and it won't be able to write to it
Nice to haves:
Plymouth can be installed on Debian, and has a few themes that are simple spinners
You can do this. Look up how to do the policies.json file. Since the Firefox directory will be read only, it won't be able to be changed by the user
I think you can still install add-ons like an ad blocker with policies.json, but not 100% dure
Nah. As long as your instance is federating with all the ones that you want to interact with, there isn't much of a reason to have multiple accounts. However, if you want to see and interact with content that your main instance has blocked, you might then make another account.
These are the Mac-exclusive apps I use regularly on my MacBook Pro 14"
CotEditor Amazing open source text editor just for Mac
BetterSnapTool for snapping windows (old school I know)
Image2icon is useful for making my dock icons consistent
TopNotch because the notch is annoying
TG Pro because Macs get hot
Keka because sometimes you run across a RAR or 7z file
These are just Mac apps, but I also use a bunch of cross-platform apps
It's always been there. They did (a long time ago now) move it all the way to the left to prevent people from pressing it all the time. In theory, Android should manage resources well enough that you shouldn't have to use it.